


leaves fallen far from that tree

by theviolonist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Aftermath, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Future, Character Death, Future Fic, Grief/Mourning, Multi, Parenthood, Polyamory, Relative Canon, Travel, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-03
Updated: 2013-05-10
Packaged: 2017-11-09 20:04:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 46,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/457856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theviolonist/pseuds/theviolonist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life didn't stop after the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It starts like this.

His face obscured by the shadows, nothing but a mouth, faintly pink; his glowing recorder set before him, sleek and shining in the light that pierces through the half-closed blinds. He refused to use magic. He said, "It's an homage," like it made sense. It didn't. 

It starts like this (it always does). 

"Tell me something you remember about Ginny Weasley."

The first one is blond and pale; he holds a pen in his hand too tightly – his knuckles are white. He's the first one he came to. It made sense, somehow. He's not sure if it still does now. It must. Something must still make sense, or everything will fall apart. Everything is so fragile since she's been gone. 

He refused to write about her. He said, “I want to say it.” It's been a long time since he hasn't talked about her. Time has been invariably long since she's been gone.

“Tell me something you remember about Ginny Weasley.”

What does he not remember, he wants to scream, but he keeps it for himself, teeth clenched around his love, vomitive and bitter. 

“She was -”

But he was wrong. There are no words to describe her. If he could, he'd open his heart and tell him to take everything of hers that's in there. That's homage, he would say. That's homage for you.

*

He remembers so many things about her, it's hard to chose one amongst all the moments he doesn't want to forget. 

He doesn't want to forget anything. Not the first time he saw her, and the way his mouth curled in disgust because he was young and foolish at the time, the way she looked up at him, big, unblinking eyes, and said “You're Draco Malefoy,” like being him was the nastiest disease of all, not because they'd told her about him but because of _him_ , what he was right at this moment. 

He's never felt so ashamed. He remembers, cheeks burning crimson, threatening her - tiny, red-headed her - the first time they met. 

He didn't notice her much at Hogwarts. Maybe he didn't want to, maybe too many people that weren't him noticed her, maybe everything was too quick and too tragic in high school for him to pay attention, too frantic and too jumbled. Maybe he needed to grow. He still doesn't know. 

He doesn't want to forget all the insults he threw her way, the times she spat back at him, mouth open to sneer something hateful and cruel, the times she passed him by, head bowed, as though she was too exhausted to answer with her usual biting sarcasm. He doesn't want to forget seeing her drenched in blood, holding Voldemort's journal in her hands. 

He doesn't want to forget her kissing Potter, again and again, little pecks on the mouth, heated, messy kisses, and his bewildered, deer-in-the-headlights look as she straddled him, as though he didn't really know who he was dealing with but knew that she was too much for him. 

He doesn't want to forget her laugh, every time he heard it, every time it sprung on him as he walked in the corridors, every time the tidal wave of it hit him, every time he hated it. Forgetting won't change anything, he's learned. He's learned a lot of things these last few years. 

He doesn't even want to forget the war. He knows it's all they talk about, those who lived it, or rather all they purposefully _don't_ talk about, the heavy silence hanging in the air that carries all the suffering and the madness and the blood, but he doesn't want to forget the war.

He remembers being young and scared and scared and so, so young. He remembers his mother cradling him against her chest and calling him baby in a whisper, his father towering him, loving him so badly it made him want to cry. He remembers screaming in his pillow, having to think about killing someone, climbing on that tower and letting someone else do it for him. 

He remembers not knowing what was right and what was wrong, and realizing that it was for him to decide, and being small and frightened and unsure. He remembers the face the most, or rather the non-face, eyes like slivers of coldness. He remembers thinking, “There can't have been a person here”, but there had, hadn't there? 

He remembers thinking how unfair, how terribly unfair this life was, thinking like a petulant child that he had never asked for this, never asked to have to make a choice, so many choices, never asked to have to fight and never asked to have to decide who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. 

He remembers it being _over_ , finally, sagging in his mother's arms, boneless. (Seeing out of the corner of his eye Ginny's straight back, looking like his mother later, in black, young but very old at the same time, the widow of an unborn hero.)

It took a long time before it didn't feel like the war. Everything wore the trace of it – the ground, burnt within an inch of itself, the bodies, the faces and the souls. _He_ wore the trace of it, no matter how hard he scrubbed, or how violently, how ardently he tried to forget.

He followed his mother to France after the war, didn't finish school at Hogwarts. He didn't think about it, but he knew in the back of his mind that they wouldn't have liked his coming back. The war taught him how cruel men can be – whether they're called 'good' or not. The war taught him a great deal of things he didn't want to know. 

He liked France – still does. Mother put him in a private school, and everything felt very polished and smooth, like drifting on the surface of a lake in an oar-less boat, sometimes catching glances of his father, his shadow in a doorway or his mangled face in a mirror. They didn't talk much about the war – but then, they never talked much about anything, never had. 

He liked France. He liked the sun and the Mediterranean climate, the accent, light and distinguished, but mostly just the fact that it wasn't _there_ , where everything had happened. He met Astoria there. Her parents had fled the country too, and she was the same as him, wasn't she, merely a casualty in the big story of life and treason and death. He liked her instantly – the first time their eyes met over a cup of tea and he saw her fingers, delicate and long, and thought 'piano-player'. 

He never asked that she teach him piano. 

They got married in a little church in the French countryside, intimate but classy, everything she wanted. She wore a high-collared dress that seemed to wrap her throat in cobweb, delicate _dentelle_ trembling when she breathed. He held her and kissed and made love to her, dizzy with happiness. The war is over, he thought as he undressed her with shaking hands on their wedding night. Finally, the war is over. 

And it was, for a time. They came back to live in the Manor, Astoria working part-time as a journalist and him still in potions, working from home, careful not to cross paths with anyone he could have known. They holed up in the Manor as much they could, feeding off their happiness. They had the house for themselves, a wedding gift from Lucius. Everything was perfect – it felt like a dream, but Draco had always been good at living in illusions. 

Scorpius was born in this illusion, a beautiful child that they both loved so much they couldn't breathe. They spent entire afternoons cuddled on the couch with the baby, Astoria's head on Draco's shoulder, his hand in her hair, murmuring sleepy endearments. Draco prayed every night for time to stop and life to just let them _be_ , no questions asked. Of course, it doesn't work that way. 

(He remembers how he used to look at her, intensely so as to miss nothing of her, the graceful way she held her shoulders straight that spoke of high society and good education, her mouth, faintly pink, her long hands and tiny breasts and long legs and perfect, grey eyes, the way she looked at Scorpius and lit up like a star, and he remembers how he thought that he was the luckiest man in the world, that all the pain had somehow been _worth-it_ if that was what he got in return.)

But eventually (of course – it had to happen) the real world caught up to him. It started softly, like a child humming a song, short-winged birds fluttering and chirping. It didn't stay that way. 

(Sometimes, even now, he asks himself how everything went wrong. He feels sorry for the life they could've lived, had they been older and wiser.)

Astoria's big, pleading eyes. “I want to _do_ something, Draco, you can understand that, can't you?” And him, with the feral instinct that the war gave him, saying no, no, don't go, trying to hold her back and keep her, keep her from slipping through his fingers. He let her, of course. He said of course, go, but just come back, come back to me, okay? 

(She didn't. Come back. She didn't come back. She got lost in the wilderness, swallowed whole by the immensity of the world, its crushing intensity. She begun suffocating. Sometimes she woke up at night saying “It's not enough, it's not enough”, words barely out of her mouth before tears were streaming down her cheeks. He knew he'd have to free her. He just tried to keep her as long as possible. Who can blame him? Who can blame him for that?)

Sometimes he's scared that they hurt Scorpius. He must have seen something – how could he not? The insults and the vases flying, flowers and water on the carpet, Astoria on her knees, begging him to let her go, frighteningly _young_ , the youth they'd forgotten with the war, forgotten to get married with, and that she'd gotten back just now, and that burnt inside her... The piano sounding wrong, the quiet tears on her porcelain skin, Draco's cold, impassive face, and Mother's voice in his head, 'Don't try to be like your father, he was a good man, just don't, trust me, baby, darling, dear...'. 

He's bright and lively now, but sometimes Draco's scared that they broke something in him that they will never be able to fix. He can do nothing but wait with bated breath and pray. He does just that, when Ginny's not looking. 

After Astoria leaves (she's not bad. She's just not a mother and not a wife, she's just a child, that's all. That's all they'd forgotten. She leaves for somewhere far away and says she'll be back soon, kisses Scorpius' eyelids and Draco's mouth and grips the handle of her suitcase, whispers 'I hope you'll forgive me someday' and leaves, just like that. Draco can't forgive her), Draco takes a look around. He knows he looks wrecked and old, and there are a few headlines with his name on them saying that he's screwed up his life, the jubilation of revenge, but he ignores them. 

He looks at the people he shared blood with. He looks at the ones he fought against. He looks at those he used to hate and those he used to love and finds that he's got to decide it all over again. He wants to sob. No one told him it would be this hard. Maybe if they had, he wouldn't have tried. But there's Scorpius cuddled against his chest, and he doesn't sob so that the heaving of his chest doesn't wake his precious child. 

Barely twenty-two, tired eyes and arms and heart, he looks at all the people he knows falling apart. He looks at Potter and Weasley hurting each other again and again but failing to get away from each other, he looks at Granger not understanding Weasley and Weasley trying but never quite reaching her. He watches them fuck up every inch of their precious happiness, and he holds his child close and promises him that he'll protect him. 

Life doesn't get better immediately, of course. It takes time and effort and more time, and the war has messed them up beyond saving, or so they think, all of them, for a split second. But they've always been fighters, even him, Draco Malfoy the Coward, and they believe in saving more than anything else. 

Ginny is the first one to disentangle herself from the claws of her unhappiness, and it's like a giant sigh breathed out by a collective chest, crushing them all at once, freeing them from the weight they hadn't realised was even there. Draco looks at her a little closer. She looks younger than she did the last time he saw her, with her face of a war widow and the blood on her cheek, running towards Potter's unconscious body ( _dead_ – or so they'd thought at the time, and he remembers the shock of it, the kick in the plexus, drawing tears he didn't mean out of his eyes). Her hair is close-cropped, her face is bright and young, and she walks in a long, confident stride, as though she was too strong to be destroyed by a war (but she isn't, he knows that now). 

He's more grateful for her at this moment than he'll ever be. 

It's like her escape saves them all. It's not easy, neither is it pretty to see, but they all manage, one after the other, painfully, with difficulty. Draco tries to breathe underwater until he finds the strength to try and wrench himself above water. 

Scorpius' first word is elating and terrifying at the same time. Draco can't help the sadness at being the only one witnessing the 'Dada' that falls out of his son's lips. He hugs him like he wants to break his bones. The war has left so much violence in him – in all of them. Sometimes he forgets to be careful. 

He tries to trust other people around his child. He gets a baby-sitter, an old woman of the neighbourhood that he recognises from St Mungo. Her name is Theresa. She's retired, and she's gentle and motherly and has an ample bosom and grey hair. Draco likes her. Scorpius too. (Narcissa and her are the same age. Once Draco sees them side by side and blinks at how different they are, how childish and young Narcissa seems in white, her long blond hair a trail of gold on her back. He wants to hug her – both of them. He doesn't. He's still a Malfoy, after all.)

It's strange being in Diagon Alley. At first he's a bit overwhelmed, all air sucked out of his lungs, quietly suffocating in the middle of the road, but he calms down gradually as people pass him by absently. A few of them recognize him, and they look as though they don't quite know how to deal with this new, older, clean-shaven version of him, sometimes ignoring him and sometimes half-heartedly sneering at him. 

He goes to a library just for the familiar smell of old books and the quietness, just to flee the dizzying, sheer speed of the crowd outside. A face peers from behind a stack of books. They both freeze. 

“Ginny Weasley,” he says, not knowing why. 

She doesn't say anything, doesn't reply to his salute or say “Here, that's the cowardly servant of the man who killed my brother,” doesn't say the thousand other hurtful things she could say, just smiles, a tiny, clipped smile, but a smile nonetheless, and disappears. An old man barges in to scold her – apparently she isn't allowed to Apparate in the shop, Draco thinks around a mouthful of dust – but she's already gone. 

It takes a few weeks before he sees her again. She doesn't really haunt him, but he sometimes thinks about her when the sun explodes in front of his windows. (It used to scare him. It woke him up and sent him crying to his mother's lap, babbling incoherently about blood and fire, and the war. She would close her eyes and cry – hold him close like the mother she tried so hard to be.)

He doesn't write about her to Pansy, not at first. He's glad that they write to each other – he likes her more than he did at Hogwarts, and it's one of the things that make him think that maybe some things are better now, after all. He always thinks a lot before he sends his letters – he thinks about the flight of his owl, all the way across the continent to Asia (he gives her food he attaches to her leg, he thinks about her face when she'll open it, he thinks about what she'll think, what she'll do. If she'll read it immediately. If she'll understand everything. What she looks like now. If she's happy. If _he_ 's happy. 

He thinks too much. 

He sees Ginny again at an open mic night in a club in London. He's begun to walk around the city – he always feels as though he's discovering over and over again, as though he's never really known it, after all. He finds little nooks he can barely fit in, voices he'd never heard before, music he hadn't realized was even here. He's like a child, a little giddy and hopeful, like all this blood that has frozen is ready to flow freely again in his veins. He wants to try everything, to touch everything. He can't wait to take Scorpius to the man who makes shrimp-flavored ice cream, hold his sticky little hand and make him twirl in the air. 

That's why he's here, that night. A little at random, a little not really, as though fate was only waiting for an occasion to make them meet again. This time, she really smiles at him, like she's rehearsed. He wonders to himself if that means she's thought of him – and then promptly thinks that he's too old to make himself this kind of reflexions. 

She walks towards him. At some point he gets this stupid thought that maybe she'll crash into him, a walking trainwreck, or that she'll pass through him, just like that. But she doesn't. She stops a few steps away from him, she looks at him in the eyes, she holds a hand out, and she says:

"Hi."

He finds her beautiful. He shakes her hand. He tries to smile. He's not really sure how it comes out in the outside, a jumble of lips and teeth, oddly incoherent. 

"Hello," he says, more softly than he thought himself capable. He doesn't really want to hurt anyone anymore. He didn't want to in the first place. He's always been a bit of a coward, to tell the truth. 

She leads him to a table, doesn't ask for his permission or his assent, just kind of takes his wrist between two long, white fingers and makes him sit next to her in a booth in which three women, probably about their age, are already sitting and looking up at him expectantly. 

He smiles. "Draco Malfoy, nice to meet you."

(It's Narcissa, she's burnt the manners into him, the gallantries and the decorum, carved on the inside of his ribs.)

They smile. One of them has on a lipstick that's very bright, red or pink, he can't really see in the changing light. Ginny is wearing a little glittery dress. She looks young, not like someone who's lived through a war. He wants to hug her for all the good she does to all of them just by existing. She saves so many lives just by being here, he's not sure she realizes. 

The girls introduce themselves. Natasha, Lavender ("We were in school together? I was Ron's girlfriend for awhile." She meets Ginny's eyes and they laugh. He doesn't remember her, but he feels like maybe it's not really an inconvenient) and Vivyan. 

Ginny looks him at in the eye again. She has little flecks of gold in her pupils. She's effortlessly beautiful. 

"We don't hate you, you know," she says as the music starts, and no one hears but him (but what she really means is 'I'). 

He nods. He doesn't know what he could possibly answer to that. What do you answer to someone who tells you they don't hate you? Thank you? 

"It's over now," she says, vehemently. "We were all victims, anyway."

He knows all that, but he isn't the same thing hearing it from someone else's mouth. He feels absolved. He feels white. 

"Thank you," he answers, even if it wasn't the right thing to say – not exactly. 

It's a good evening. They drink and sway between the tables, half-dancing with their palms open. Lavender is sharp and pretty and bubbly. She has a kid she loves like burning. She laughs like a princess that has drunk too much wine. When Ginny and Draco crash back into the booth, they break one of Vivyan's bracelets, a strange, wiry thing she's brought back from Africa. She just laughs. She says things are made to be broken. It resounds in Draco's chest. 

He likes her and he likes her friends, the essence of a youth they haven't had the time to live. Natasha dances with a boy and a girl, holds both their hands and smiles, eyes shut in the middle of the dance floor. Draco wonders if beauty and happiness are the same thing. He isn't sure. 

When he comes back to his son that night, his cheek still a little sticky from Ginny's gloss where she kissed him and whispered a 'See you soon' that felt like a promise and maybe was one, he watches him sleep for a moment, heart racing wildly in his chest. "I made it," he thinks, elated, as he watches the beautiful thing he created. He thanks every god he knows, and even the ones he doesn't. 

Their relationship progresses in baby steps, foggy evenings in tiny restaurants, dancing, music, and this one time at the library when he sees her and they get talking about literature for nearly two hours. "I've met all these books after the war," she says with a gesture that encompasses the whole room, the building, even, her eyes a little sad. "I felt like they were waiting for me." He doesn't know if they were, but if it's the case, he thinks they were right to. 

He falls in love with her slowly but surely. It's a strange thing, being in love with Ginny Weasley. She's not at all like Astoria – she brings a lot of things with her, turbulent brothers and an history of loving people and also Harry Troublesome Potter (he says troublesome because he's afraid she'll hear somehow if he thinks something else. After all, he has a tendency to think loudly when it's about Harry Potter and Ginny has revealed herself to be much more stronger than expected). It's a whole package you get to deal with when you fall in love with Ginny Weasley. You have to be ready to face the consequences. 

He thinks maybe she loves him too. He's not sure, because they fight a lot and sometimes she has little gestures that show him she doesn't trust him completely yet (a hand that draws away, an unconscious flinch, all these things that sting, despite everything). He thinks it must be easier for him to love her, because she knows the worst of him and he has to convince her that he isn't like that, that this isn't all there is to him. But there's something. There's no mistaking the spark that glints in her eyes when she looks at him, unguarded, sometimes. 

(They fight about the war, the things they did and didn't do. All the ideas that were planted in his head and that stick, but also the ones he really believes in. Her insistence on loving the whole world. Her petty meanness. She sends sharp little jabs that hurt, her lips upturned in a sneer.)

One night, when he's walking her home, he dares to step forward and kiss her, but she dodges his lips and retreats in the safety of her flat, her eyes a little apologetic (the flat in central London, tiny but comfortable, with brightly coloured walls and a collection of autographed Bludgers). He understands, but he can't help but be hurt. 

He doesn't try again for a long time. "It was too soon," he thinks, and he's right, but he also thinks he'll let he make the first move the next time. He does let her. She makes the move, in her own time. He's grateful. He's grateful for everything she does. 

He introduces her to his son on the first of march 2010. It's a sunny afternoon outside, the nature buzzing with renewed energy, and it felt right to bring her here today, with her nose full of spring scents and her light skirt. She doesn't wear a lot of skirts, he found out, because she likes to be taken seriously and because it's too girly, anyway, not practical enough for a daredevil like her. 

He laughs when she says that, but it's true, of course, she spends her time climbing and running and falling and always getting up, her hands scratched. Sometimes he's the one to put alcohol on her palms, and she laughs and winces. He admires her for that. He admires her for a lot of things – she blinds him a little. 

She wears this skirt (light blue, a flimsy material, almost see-through) because Fleur gave it to her. "She brought it back from Paris the last time she went," she says, frowning a little for some reason. Her nose is adorably scrunched up. He's a little in love with her, nothing new. 

She crosses the threshold with something that resembles wariness. (Much later, she won't even think. It'll take time, but it'll happen. In return (but the word isn't good, it isn't a trade, it's life) he'll eat with her friends and he won't even mind). 

The light floods into the room as it tends to do these days. He knows it's the climate change, but something small and hopeful in him, rekindled by the solitary life he leads with his two-and-a-half-years-old son, thinks it's because life is better, brighter, and is only going to get better. He deserves it. They all deserve it, no matter what they've done. (No one is innocent in a war. There are only heroes and villains and martyrs.)

He's talked the maid into taking the day off to see her son in Manchester. The house is silent, the only noise the crickets outside and the shuffling of the leaves. A gentle wind is blowing that makes the air crisp and fresh. She takes a deep breath. Narcissa lives in the joint house, but she's always been very quiet. Sometimes when he was a child he had to remind himself to notice her (she became more conspicuous during the war. He knows now that she woke up to protect him, and it makes him feel warm and sad at the same time). 

Scorpius comes running down the stairs like a tornado. His hair is sticking up in every direction, and he seems to be screaming something about pirates and evil sorcerers. He runs right into Ginny's arms. She lets out an undignified 'oof', caught unaware, but her personality catches up to her and she crouches to hug the little boy, her mouth stretched out in a smile. Draco's heart kind of seems like it wants to explode.

Of course, they hit it off, and then it goes seamlessly, Ginny coming more and more, and once, walking up to him at night as he leads her towards the fireplace, cupping his face and kissing him, square on the mouth, not a really good kiss but a Ginny kiss, messy and enthusiastic and burning. Him kissing her back. It takes time but not as much as he thought it would. He goes to the Burrow and they don't even stonewall him too much, just look at their entangled hands with matching looks of confusion, but shrug, because they're 'good people', at least some of them, or they think they are. Draco knows they're having a hard time with it, but he also knows that Ginny's a 'deal with it' kind of girl, so he doesn't worry too much. 

In reality, it takes years for the Weasleys to tolerate him, and a few more for them to like him, even if there's still this undercurrent of distrust, this ready-to-jump wariness in their movements that Ginny's unconditional love for him wiped off of her. He doesn't mind as much as she should, because just Ginny will always be enough. 

He continues to be surprised everyday with how much he continues to love her. They fight, of course, they do (how could they not?), and they change each other, but in a good way, or at least he thinks it's a good way, and that's enough for him. 

They're having dinner, curled together in the couch, her head nestled in the crook of his neck, his arm looped loosely around her waist. He dims the light with a slack wrist, his wand dangling between his fingers, buzzing lightly when he whispers 'Lumos reductis'. (He's not afraid to use his wand anymore. He knows he's not the only one who hid it in a drawer and left it there for ten years.)

"Does Astoria ever come to see Scorpius?" she asks in a little voice, barely above the crackling of the fire. 

She's been here for five years now – she knows the answer. 

He sighs – it isn't really a sad sigh, it's just a sigh. It means what it means, a lot of things, not all of them sad, and not all of them happy, either. 

"Do you know why?" Ginny asks, sounding genuinely curious. He smiles down at her. God, her loves her so much. 

"She doesn't have your maternal instinct, Gin. She was happy with Scorp at first because he was pretty and it was what she thought she wanted, a baby and a family," he gives her a look that means 'You know the Greengrasses', "but it wasn't. He exhausted her."

Ginny's eyes are really big, and the fire throws a red flame amongst the diamonds that shine in them. "But he's her child!"

He presses her against his heart. He doesn't understand either, but he doesn't judge. 

"I know."

Times passes quietly, dripping like hot wax on a candle, slow and thick. 

"She's not a bad person, you know. She's just – she was made to be free, that's all. She couldn't have anything tying her down, I guess."

He feels that Ginny is on the verge on saying something, but he kisses her to shut her up. She'll never understand, it's not her fault, she's just not part of this world, of this selfishness that can sometimes be a little too sublime. It doesn't matter, he just doesn't want to linger on it. Sue him. 

"You want to have another baby?" she asks very suddenly, pulling back from the kiss, a hand poised on his chest, light but firm. 

He's not going to lie, he's surprised. He really shouldn’t be, because she – unlike Astoria – does have this "maternal instinct", whatever it is, the patience for Scorpius that she doesn't have for herself, the spontaneity and the warmth and the readiness to make herself ridiculous. And they've been together for five years now, after all, it's a lot, and Scorpius will be off to Hogwarts in a few years, it makes sense, not that he expected Ginny to have planned to _make sense_ , because he hasn't, couldn't, isn't the type to think about that. 

He's always thought they were too young – he has a lot of reasons not to have thought about it at all, actually. He's always thought they were too young – but they aren't, not anymore. Ginny is thirty now and he's thirty-one, it's not the 'limit' but in a few years it will start being late. (It's like his vision of them hasn't changed with time, he realizes. They're still newlyweds in his head.)

The thing is – it's something, a pregnancy. He knows what they say, that it's something you do together, but he also knows it isn't completely true. He doesn't have a body that shifts and bends and stretches to accommodate a someone in his belly. He doesn't mind it, it's how it is, but there's a difference, and changing, changing like that, creating something and making it grow, it's not nothing. 

(He thinks that it's more important, more _huge_ for him than it is for her, because his mother didn't deal well with it either, didn't know what to do with the stretch marks and the little wiggling thing in her arms. It's king of a curse, he thinks. Frost, on her heart. 

It's okay, she loves him. It isn't enough, but it's an effort.)

But Ginny had a mother like there are in fairytales, a woman with a large bosom who's buxom and wide-hearted, exuding warmth, a mother that cooks and scolds and gives birth like it's her job. He's grown to love Molly (he suspects she likes him too), but he was surprised at the beginning to find out that she was exactly as she seemed, as vibrant and fiercely loving. He sees Ginny in her, all the time. 

He has a jumper with a green D on it in his closet – his emotion when he opened the package and found it (they were in Italy at the time, visiting a couple they met through Theodore and became friends with) made Ginny laugh. 

"Okay?" he says, asks, a little tentative. He really should think about this. 

He feels more than he sees her lips stretch in a smile. She kisses the back of his hand and she repeats, the word buzzing against his skin, surer, more confident:

"Okay."

They have the baby. It's a long process, feels longer now, in the ripe heat of their age that is at the same time the height of their youth and the beginning of something else less frantic, calmer. The nine months feel like nine months – it's kind of a novelty, because the last time they felt like a wild whoosh of wind and a breath and there it was, a baby dropped in their lap. 

It feels different – maybe even better, but he doesn't want to compare his children, and he won't do it. 

Ginny wears the wide belly and swollen ankles as well as she does anything, with a smile and shining eyes. They learn to deal with this strange protuberance when they navigate in the kitchen. Everyone coos – Molly especially, but really everyone. 

It's a boy. 

Happiness flows in, open doors, doesn't leave. 

The years pass. Ginny Weasley is laughing in his living-room, her head thrown back, strands of burning hair flowing on her shoulders. He'd never thought it would happen, ever. He's glad it did, though – he's glad it still _does_. He's deliriously happy. 

"Have you talked to Pansy about the baby-sitter?" he asks. Her smile is infectious. He doesn't bother trying to resist it. 

He doesn't bother trying to resist her anymore. It's useless, and he doesn't want to. Besides, she does a remarkably good – and frightening – Bat-Bogey Hex. 

"I did," she says, her smile not faltering one bit. He's always had trouble not letting his face fall back down to its schooled impassibility, but she can go on smiling for hours. He loves that about her. Sometimes he thinks he loves everything about her. It's a little scary, but he's grown used to it – it doesn't terrify him nearly as much as it used to. 

"She told me she would give me the name, and that Nat will love her."

"I hope so. He's terribly picky."

She laughs again, honey and sun running down her open throat. "I wonder where he gets that from," she teases. 

He kisses her. 

It took them time, and effort, and love, to succeed. It hasn't been easy. It still isn't. But they made it. They are here, now, in their house, with their children and their love and their wonderful, wonderful life, and he can't help but wonder what he did to deserve this happiness. (At first, Gin didn't like the house. She thought it was too snobbish, too 'Pureblood'. She didn't like the big staircase and the thick, heavy curtains. She felt like a stranger, she'd said at the time, when she'd moved in with him, two years after their first kiss. She didn't want to be a stranger in her own house. Eventually, though, they worked it out, they made compromises. They always swore they wouldn't let their differences tear them apart. He's proud that they stuck to this promise.)

He starts a little when Nat storms into the room and heads straight for his mother's legs, clutching at them with that desperate strength that only comes from a game he's invested himself wholly into. Scorpius comes running after him a while after, and stops short when he spots the two of them. "Too old to play games," his ten-years-old face, red from the embarrassment, says. 

Draco opens his arms and is relieved when Scorpius buries his face into his chest – relieved that he isn't too old for that, too. 

He breathes in deeply, his son pressed against him; he looks at his wife and his children and he thinks, _this_ , this is happiness. He can't really believe it, but here it is. 

Ginny and him – they've held onto each other for so long, it's even gotten a little abstract, a time that you don't count in years but in memories, in moments like those, basking in the warm glow of their happiness that still feels newfound. 

Scorpius is almost ten. He'll receive his Hogwarts letter in July. Sometimes they spend hours wondering which house he'll be sorted in, which friends he'll have, if he'll play Quidditch (but they're pretty sure he won't. He was always more interested in his toy train than in the toy broom they offered him for Christmas when he was three). He calls Ginny 'Mama', and she presses him against her heart and lets his breathing regulate the beating of her heart, even though he squirms and claims he isn't a baby.

God, this life.

And because everything is radiant and vibrant and beautiful, he draws Ginny closer, so that the four of them form a multi-legged, smiling, breathing entity. A family. That's it, he thinks to himself, inhaling a waft of flowery perfume from Ginny's flaming hair. A family.

(Draco doesn't have many memories after that, not any he wants to share, anyway. He'll stick to this, Ginny's hair tickling his nose, Scorpius' arm secured around him making his leg fall asleep. This is where he belongs. The rest – after – doesn't matter.)

*

He doesn't break down. He opens his mouth to say something, but nothing comes out, and he closes it back. He shuts his eyes for a fleeting second – fluttery eyelids, something like a tear hanging from one of his lashes – and when he opens them again, they're his eyes again, mercurial grey, hard and unrelenting. 

"I remember everything about her," he says, and the other man, hidden in the shadows, admires him for not letting his voice break. 

Then, just as the silence threatens to take over and drown them, he whispers, his voice soft and fragile and unlike him, "She had a beautiful laugh."

He sounds so _tired_ – exhausted really, exhausted by the pain and the grief, his shoulders heavy and his eyes inexorably sad. 

The other man sweeps out like a tiger, swift and sleek, feline even, without making a sound. He wouldn't have known how to do that before. He does now.


	2. Chapter 2

The second one is as red-haired as she was. His face is grim and shut, maybe even angry, although he doesn't seem to quite know what to direct his anger at. He didn't want to come; someone forced him. The man suspects he would've come anyway, in the end, a little shameful maybe. He wants to talk about her. He just doesn't want to open these wounds. 

He shouts. 

"Do not record me, you bloody _moron_ , or I swear, I will hit you, I will. Why do I even have to do this bloody thing? You're not a therapist, God, you absolute _git_ , you're the most unlike person to ever be a therapist person in the _world_ , why do I – why do I --"

He stutters, he's like a broken record, he stops and startles and _hurts_ , it's difficult to see, to watch. He can't hold it together. It's a startling contrast with the first one – maybe it's one of the reason why they never liked each other, the way they are so deeply, essentially _different_. 

He breaks down and cries for a long time.

The man could stand up and hold him, but he doesn't. He feels like it's not his place. Maybe that's what war does to people. 

*

When he sees her for the first time, she's exactly two seconds old, and he's one. He shouldn't remember; to be honest, he's almost certain he forged the memory, but he holds onto it. It's such a beautiful memory. It has this amazing characteristic that it never fades – has never faded, in all these years he's gripped it in times of need, tugged at it and tried to rip it to shreds out of anger. 

It's Molly looking down at the little, ugly thing in her arms, as though she was the ninth World Wonder (he used to call her 'wonder' in his head), her smile threatening to break out of her face . It's Arthur beaming with pride, holding his sons close to his chest. It's all five of them peering from under his arm to try and see the little girl – their _sister_ or so the adults told them, but they want to check, the idea seems a little strange, it's always been boys here after all. It's the nurse smiling a private, indulging smile, as though the miracle of life never gets old, even though it has to. It's the smell, a bit gross, of plasma and clean, new flesh, mixed with sweat, shoulders and thighs itching with it, salty and moist. 

"We're calling her Ginny," Molly says, her voice firm despite the exhaustion that pierces through it. 

Arthur starts to object – maybe they should think about it later, you're tired, honey, and I – but Molly holds up a dismissive hand. "Do _not_ think that I spent bloody ten hours spouting this baby up and that I don't get to choose her name," she intones. 

Arthur smiles down at the little thing, breathing tiny and almost inaudible, and smiles. 

"Hello, Ginny," he says. 

The whole room seems to OD with sugar. 

It goes on from there, not always better, not always worse but always different, _new_. Ginny grows into a fiery little girl with a mop of red hair (Molly doesn't want her to catch lice at school, and besides, do you know how much trouble it is to wash that kid's hair, what with her always running about in the mud God-knows-where? No you don't, I'll tell you that, otherwise you wouldn't criticize my cutting her hair, I can assure you – her clothes are bloody enough to wash, thank you very much) that wants to do what boys do and frowns at her girlfriends when they talk about make-up and boys. 

She whines endlessly at her brothers to take her on their teams when they play Quidditch on their crappy brooms in the garden; she draws girls running in fields (blue, green, golden); she refuses to eat broccoli and peanut butter; she turns out to be allergic to cats and sneezes like a maniac every time someone lets her pet one. 

Her brothers love her. The older ones swear that they'll break the fingers of the boys who try to get into her pants when she grows up. She doesn't understand why anyone would want to get into her pants – don't they have their own? Besides, the ones she's wearing right now are pink and tattered, she doesn't really see whose first choice they would be. They laugh and tell her she'll be beautiful – she already is. She beams.

She grows up to be a ferocious little girl, teeth bright and straight in her mouth and still that burning red mane. She's still a little tomboy, but sometimes boys who are not scared of intrusive older brothers and Gnomes come up to her and try to seduce her with nine-year-old smugness. She brushes them off. (She does have a brief romance with Jack Flinn, in second grade, though. Fred and George scare him off.)

Her brothers go away one by one, though, swallowed by King's Cross' 9 ¾ track. She stomps before the old mastodon that is the Hogwarts train, as if to say, "You don't intimidate me." They all find her adorable and laugh, though less when comes the time to explain to her why she can't follow them there yet. 

There is a year when it's just her and Ron and Molly and Arthur in the house. Ginny clings to Ron because she knows he's going to go away too, but he's ten and he chases her off, doesn't want to play with her because she's a girl and girls have cooties. Ginny frowns and goes crying in her mother's skirts.

One night, she has a nightmare. She wakes up crying and shaking, her head full of villains and teeth and monsters, and she runs to the first person she thinks of. Ron's hair sticks out of the blankets in a messy red mop, and his snores are heavy and regular. Just seeing him reassures her, sends warmth flooding in her chest, but she runs to the bed anyway, wakes him with tiny, kittenish whispers and tickles. He grunts a little, but she says she's afraid, and he lets her in bed with him. They fall asleep curled around each other, Ron's scrawny arms secured tightly around his sister's middle. The adults coo when they find them in the morning, and Ron blushes beet red. Ginny beams. 

But Ron has to leave too, eventually. He's excited and the six brothers go to Diagon Alley together, the notes their parents gave them already crumpled in their hands. Ginny trails after them. They pretend not to care, but they keep an eye on her while buyings their books and helping Ron choose his quill. They buy ice-cream and meet old classmates. The air is heavy and sticks to their skins, it's summer. 

The house is empty without them. Ginny runs aimlessly around the house and cries when they don't come back. She's not used to the silence and the ticking of the clock (but she loves the clock, it's so much fun seeing where everyone is all the time, she used to point to it and giggle when she was a little girl). She makes new friends, and sometimes invites them for sleepovers, but secretly she dreams of finally receiving this letter. 

Then she is old enough to go to Hogwarts and she gets the letter. She squeals all over the place, jumps up and down until she's dizzy with it, buzzing with unrestrained energy. Everything is new and fun, choosing a wand (hers is hazel wood with a Kerpie hair core and it's gorgeous, all dark and polished), riding the train (she pats its flank before she goes, drops a whisper against its sleek, metallic skin), the carriages. She makes friends. 

Ron watches over her. He's pretty busy with Harry and Hermione and all his classes, but he keeps time to check up on his baby sister. She's not so young anymore – she's all long limbs and not-quite-feminine curves hidden under her robes. Sometimes a glance of ankle peeks out from beneath the tattered fabric, and he finds himself seized by an uncrushable anxiety. He tries to quash it, he's young, it'll pass. 

The years pass, with their monsters and dragons and evil sorcerers. Ron finds himself lost in this world of adventure. Sometimes he can't quite grasp the fact that it's _real_ , that if he falls he won't be able to pick himself up, and when he does he gets so frightened he chokes. He's lost in his own skin, too, in his too-big smile and his joking ways. He knows he's a bit of a buffoon but he doesn't care, kind of likes it when he sees the smile on everyone's faces when he does something stupid. He's not as idiotic as he seems, but it's okay if everyone assumes he is.

He doesn't do very well academically. He could do better, not by a lot but at least a bit, but he prefers to let Hermione help him, let her hair fall on his shoulders when she stands beside him, smelling like shampoo, her arms bracketing his face. He feels himself falling in love with her, and he lets himself. Why wouldn't he? When he's close to dying, which happens a lot during these years, he tries to think up as many moments of their imagined life together in his head as he can. After the first three times, he has a house with hardwood floors that smell of sun. After the fourth, they have children. 

He's too young to dream of that, children and stability and calm, but these days it's the best you can get, what with the London sky being dark and the forest damp, leaves swishing under your feet. He knows what his mother would say ("grown-up dreams," and he wouldn't know if she means it in a good or bad way), but he lets himself dream. It's really the best he can do. 

(It's like a family dream, having children. It's as worn out and reassuring as the scent of the loaves of bread Molly shovels out of the oven, as old, as passed-on. It feels good like a warm blanket in your shoulders; no uncertainty, only love and what grows out of it.)

In Ron's seventh year, there's the Battle. A lot has happened before that. Ron lost Ginny for a moment, and suddenly she came back all grown-up and womanly, wide hips and small, pear-shaped breasts. Everyone has evolved, but it's on her that change is the most striking even though she still has this burning Gryffindor soul, teenage rebellion high and red on her cheeks. She starts dating. It makes the whole tribe of brothers cringe and judge, but she carries on, brushes them off like she's always done as she strings lovers as though they were pearls in a necklace, each of them ornate and precious but not quite good enough. 

She falls in love with Harry. She's always had a crush on him, ever since Ron brought him home that first summer, but Ron never thought it would _make_ something, come to fruition. It always seemed hopeless. It's different this time around, though; her love has had the time to grow ripe and by the time Harry notices her she's ready, confident and strong. 

Ron doesn't like it, itches to say something, forbid it, but in the end he understands that he can't, so he lets it happen. He can almost see the joy bubbling in their veins as they stumble in the middle of the room, snogging like there's no tomorrow. Hermione watches him out the corner of her eye. Ron pretends not to notice. He's developed this irrational fear over the years that _something_ him out of everyone). Being a teenager sucks, he doesn't like it, not a bit.

He gets a girlfriend for the first time, Lavender. She's sweet and a little dumb, clingy, girly, everything that Hermione isn't and kissing her feels strange but also good, because now it's like he's like everyone, he _fits_ in. You don't fit in a lot when you're Harry Potter's best friend. Ron knows it, he's accepted it, but sometimes it feels good to be the one he could've been if he hadn't met a hurricane on his first trip to Hogwarts, be it only for a moment. 

Hermione goes crazy with what he'll understand later is jealousy. At the time only feels like she's slipping away from him, growing colder with tight fists and all her head focused into studying. That's her anger, he'll learn later. His anger is blown-out and crazy, fire and storm, but hers is snow piercing your skin and tiny insinuations like needles. Sometimes he reminds her of the birds and he laughs at her, kisses her mouth, says, "You love me." She doesn't deny it.

Ginny mocks him. She's a sharp little thing at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, a heartbreaker with a strong temper and she's a Chaser and she's loved Harry with the quivering love of a little girl but now she loves him fiercely, talks about dragon tattoos and plants fiery kisses on his mouth. He looks like he doesn't quite know what to make of her. They're younger than her, in a sense. She's the most grown-up out of all of them, and the most reckless. 

Seventh year rolls around. Harry breaks her heart and Ron can't take all the pain, everywhere, his family and his friends and Hermione and leaving the school. There's no sun anymore – the sky is always black, bearing Voldemort's greenish mark like it was always there, inked in the sky. Harry doubts but never really thinks about fleeing. When he's alone, Ron starts planning escape routes, Romania and Russia and the evil is only there, in their country. They could leave. They don't. 

(Ron doesn't watch when Harry leaves Ginny behind. She's a kid: he tells her _I'm sorry_ , but it's not enough, she's crying and her eyes are red and puffed and unglamorous and she hates him through clenched teeth but this war doesn't give people the time to grow up, so she says okay, I'll fight, come back and she readies herself for death. Ron can't bear that. It's his sister – he saw her come out of his mother's belly, and he loves her so much that it hurt. Leaving her in danger is like taking an Avada Kedavra to the chest.)

Ron makes mistakes by dozens, falls and catches himself on his hands, hurts his palms and his knees. Christmases and birthdays spent in fear and Ron stops believing that they'll ever see the end of this. They're in the forest and it feels like a last shot; he's cold and wet and unhappy and scared and he leaves. 

So many horrible things happen – now Ron doesn't remember them in chronological order, can't say, "I heard Bellatrix torture Hermione after I thought she was sleeping with Harry", can't say what sky fell on their heads first. But now he doesn't care anymore. He didn't care then either, but it was for another reason, a reason that felt like ashes at the pit of his stomach, swimming upstream in his veins, making him cough blood and fire. 

He tries not to think about Ginny. When he's in the woods, he tries not to think about anything but the immediacy of it, the here, now of trying to save a world that didn't even give him that much just because no one else will do it. That's when he understands Harry the most: he doesn't want this, doesn't want to be The Boy Who Lived or whatever it is they call him now. But he has to, because there isn't anyone else. And no one is even _trying_ , either: they're so content to dump it all on their shoulders, let them do the job. 

And they're children, Ron sees that and it's like a scream: they're children, they can't do the job, they can barely organize their own love lives, for God's sake! But they have no choice, so Ron screws his eyes shut at night and tries not to crawl into Hermione's sleepbag and hold her, tries not to dream about his parents and his brothers and sisters and the war. He sleeps.

It's never easy; it lasts forever and they're in the dark, hopelessness seeps into their bones and contaminates them one after the other. Hermione stays standing until the very end. Ron has never admired her more and loved her with a greater fire than then, when she stands tall and urges them to keep fighting, reminds them that this is their world. Think about what surrender will mean, she says. She's not even the _purest_ of them all, and that's maybe the moment when Ron realizes really how little purity of blood matters, in the end. 

The weeks drag on. The sun doesn't come back out; even Hermione gets breathless eventually, and instead of exhorting them she resorts to walking, just walking. At night they huddle near the transistor and listen to pirate radio, unaware of how much they resemble Muggles at another point in time, fighting a battle that looked much like theirs. 

Ron doesn't really remember the Hogwarts Battle. Well. That's a lie, he does remember it, excruciatingly well, actually. He remembers every corpse whether he knows their name or not, and he remembers every gesture he made, every aborted try to save someone he ended up losing. But remembering costs too dear, so he doesn't. Ron is simple. He isn't stupid, but he isn't a masochist either, and nothing matches the pain of losing his best friend coupled with the pain of just _losing_ , losing the world he grew up in, and worst of all, losing hope. 

It wasn't for that long, but Ron remembers this feeling of being engulfed by darkness, completely, utterly powerless. He remembers lowering his wand, numb, frozen, mind blank of anything else but "We lost". Even kneeling near Fred's lifeless body didn't feel as crushingly, awfully final. There was still revenge, fighting for your blood, this blood that had dragged so many into war and forced them to take arms. There was still getting even. Harry dying is – the end. That's all there is, then. His body, carried by Hagrid, Narcissa Malfoy looking down, Voldemort, and the end. Looming. There. 

But then, of course, Neville becomes a hero (Ron didn't expect that one – no one really did, but there are few people he's ever been more grateful to see than Neville when he rose with the sword, his eyes rimmed red with tears), Harry wakes up. More die, but the world is saved, eventually.

Ron remembers the wave of them, the new generation, Hogwart's children. But he also remembers them alone, damp and cold, too weak to hold their wands up. He remembers the look in Ginny's eyes when she saw Harry's body, but he's not sure if the pain that sears his chest when he recalls it is hers or just his own, projected unto everything. It was so strong. So dark, so terrifyingly dark. 

It's hard to be Harry Potter's friend, Ron has thought that many times. He would lie if he said he never regretted coming up to him that first day in the Hogwarts Express and making friends the easy way he always does. It could have someone else so easily. But he never regrets it long enough for it to _mean_ something, because in the end, Boy Who Lived or not, Harry Potter is still Harry, Ron's best friend, and that means something more than destruction and fire and adventure. It also means laughter and Butterbeer and staying up late in the Common Room. It also means complicity. It means so much more than just a silly scar and a few dragons, in the end. 

But if you're Harry Potter the Boy Who Lived's friend, you get to see Voldemort dying. There's nothing quite like it. If Harry dying was a dream quietly releasing its final whisper, a flame shushed by a rain too heavy and too pouring, in addition to a best friend giving his dying breath, then Voldemort dying was the end of the darkness. It sounds cliché, to say that. It was so much more. 

What really got Ron was the sound when his back hit the ground. It sounds like a funny thing to notice when the enemy that threatened to destroy your whole country finally comes to a much-deserved end, but that's what got Ron. The thing is, death is never a happy thing. Even Voldemort's death. 

Ron didn't see it, at first. He didn't party all night like some did, trying to forget the blood and the dead and the disasters, revelling in the fact that all of it was _over_. He doesn't blame them. He just didn't. At the time he didn't question his decision to sit cross-legged in 12, Square Grimmaud all night, talking in hushed tones with Harry and Hermione. Not with his family. Not with the Army. He couldn't have partied with any army, whatever side they were on. It seems selfish, ungrateful maybe for all those who fought with him, for them, but it wouldn't have felt right, and Ron desperately needed something to feel right. As it was, this didn't exactly feel right either, but it felt like the only possible choice.

It could've gone a lot of different ways. There's never a definite ending to their story, and maybe that's what Ron likes about them, the way something can always go different, twist itself into greatness. All his hope fed on that. Harry's victory was based on that. Twists of fate. It was a childish thing, but then, this war was a childish war. Childhood is always where history finds its greatest monsters. 

They sat in the dim light, wedged a few pillows between them. Ron pulled Hermione near (he thought like that, at the time: now that I've got her, I won't let her get away), and they melted into each other's arms. Harry's faced was tired, made golden and warm by the light. They talked about mundane things, all but the things they'd lived that night. There wasn't any blood in their words, no Avada Kevadras, and most of all, no corpses. Instead, they told each other secrets they'd never dared or never thought to share before. They didn't talk about what they'd do when the dawn would rise. They talked about music and Muggle movies and Hermione tried to explain to them why she likes skiing so much.

Maybe it wasn't the right thing to do. Maybe they ought to have expunged all the poison directly, pushed it all out before it could pervade them and start the gangrene. Maybe it would've made Harry better. Maybe not. They were the first winners of this war, even though it didn't feel like a victory, and there was no manual. Everything was left for them to invent, so that's what they did. They made up the rules. 

It's taken years for Ron to understand why Voldemort's death didn't make him happy. For years he accepted it as _something_ , he didn't investigate it. It was a time of darkness and pain, he would think, and not be sure that any happiness was allowed in the unbreathable, ash-heavy air, even in tiny slivers. And then one morning, as he was lying there, Hermione sprawled cleanly (Hermione is the only person Ron knows who's capable of sprawling cleanly) beside him, he understood. 

It didn't come all at once. It started with Ginny. He remembered Ginny's diary. She's told him about his friend, at first. He hadn't listened, and she'd never mentioned it again, so he'd forgotten, but there were a few seconds where joy shone on her face, immediate and bright. "A new friend," she said. "His name is Tom."

And then in fragments – Tom, Tom Riddle in the Chamber of Secrets, Tom Riddle in Harry's trip to the past, Tom, Tom, Tom. Not Voldemort, a one-sided name, made inhuman by its wholeness, its brusqueness, but Tom Riddle. A boy's name. A human's name. That's why Voldemort's death wasn't happy, he realized, images of Harry breaking the wand flashing in his mind. It's because it was Tom Riddle's death as well. 

Hermione stirred next to him. "What's going on?" she asked, with that freakish ability to decipher Ron's mood. 

He raked a hand through her hair. Even now, he couldn't believe it. The luck. "M'fine," he said. "Go back to sleep."

So that's what happens. The war ends, Harry and Hermione and Ron talk, sitting cross-legged in a house that used to host a grumpy ghost. 

They go their separate ways in the morning. Ron and Hermione are holding hands, and it's a new thing, a thing that fills Ron with joy and pride and apprehension. He doesn't quite dare looking at her, but when he does, she looks back and smiles. 

They part. Hermione goes back home for a bit, reassures her parents and fills herself to the brim with their company. Ron stays with his own. The Burrow is glum, not nearly as alive as it usually is. Two members of the family are dead, others are injured, and the Weasleys really are nothing if not an extended family. They take all the dead and the hurt for themselves, bear the brunt of the grief for those that have no one to mourn them. 

The clock is broken. Ron doesn't know if it broke because too many went missing, because it sensed the darkness or the despair, or because someone – probably Molly – threw something at it and broke it. Ron has no difficulty imagining a wooden spoon flying through the air and hitting the hands, stilling them in place.

The first days at the Burrow are hard, like dragging your feet through the mud when hope is nothing but a threadbare jumper covering half your skin, when it feels like it's leading you on. George's face is closed, says nothing. His mouth doesn't say anything either. Molly cries. Arthur cries, less, but he cries too. Ginny's face is hard. 

She's changed so much. Ron has trouble recognizing her. He doesn't look much in the mirror, but if he did, he probably wouldn't recognize himself either. But he's Ginny's brother, and his sister used to be a feral kitten, a sixteen-year-old soon-to-be woman with jutting hipbones and berry-red lips. Now she's a widow. She's lived a war, her own, like everyone, but she's also lived someone else's. She's been the one who's left behind, the one who should be returned to but isn't. Ginny Weasley. She's not just that anymore. She's something of Harry Potter, whether she wants it or not. 

Harry is there, too, of course. The 12, Square Grimmaud is his, but as much as he's always liked to be alone, it doesn't seem to be the case now. Ron can hardly blame him: he was there through much of the whole thing, but he's not blind enough not to see that most of the adventure happened in the past, and in Harry's brain. In the skin simmering beneath his scar. Ron did his best not to leave him alone, but when you're Harry Potter he supposes you're always alone in one way or another. 

So Harry is there, and he doesn't say much, either. There's a lot of silence in the Burrow in 1999, which is unusual in itself. Fleur and Bill sleep in the guest room for a month until they decide to leave, and everyone sees them off to the chimney, helping Fleur with her suitcases. It feels off, of course. No one wants to let them go. The war has been won, but there's always the nagging suspicion that it could be another trick. Maybe they haven't won, after all. It certainly doesn't feel like it. 

Harry and Ron help with the household chores. Sometimes Ginny wanders into the room and Ron watches Harry drift over to her, bumping in her arms like an unmoored ship. He sees her trying to comfort him, shushing in his hair and trying to pet the available skin, the nape of his neck, his forearms, his cheeks, but her mouth is twisted and he's keening like an animal in pain. It's a tough sight to see. Ron looks away. 

He's not a coward, or at least, he wouldn't describe himself as one. Of course, the medals and the honours don't mean anything, but if asked to describe himself under Veritaserum, Ron Weasley probably wouldn't say he was a coward. He doesn't think he is. He thinks he's wise enough not to willingly hurt himself when he can be spared. It seems like a smart enough choice. 

Life can't sit still, and it doesn't. For one, Hermione comes back. 

She comes back on a Tuesday morning. She apparates in the chimney, one of her neat apparations where she lands with her head high and her back straight, hand curled around the handle of her suitcase. Ron wonders if Molly sent her a letter to invite her. She doesn't need one, of course, but if she did, it was a nice thing to do, in the middle of all this chaos. He makes a mental note to think and ask her. 

Hermione looks around for about a quarter of second before she spots Harry and leaps in his arms. Ron isn't jealous; she changes arms soon enough, anyway, and then here she is, warm and here and his fingers are pressed against her stomach through the coat and they hug fiercely, tightly. He could probably breathe something like "You're here" but there's no need, and he prefers to breathe _her_ instead. He missed her. She missed him, too. 

They're both a little red when they pull away, and she hesitates a moment before ducking and catching his mouth in a quick kiss. It's sweet but perfunctory, just a statement: this is still happening. We're still happening. The war hasn't destroyed this. (It hasn't created it, either.)

The others are stunned for a brief moment but after a while they start clapping, at first slowly and then with enthusiasm, teasing. Molly even lets out a small whoop. They all know what she's thinking: maybe love can triumph, after all. It's not quite that simple, of course, but it's a good thought, so they don't say anything. 

There are a few more weeks where nobody leaves the Burrow. Things are being dealt with outside, and sometimes they're called out for something, a testimony, a medal, an opinion. Most of the time they decline, but when it's important, when they have to identify a victim or condemn a criminal, they do it. They always come back, though. Even though they don't say it, they're all afraid that the foundation of the house might not hold if they leave. That's what this house is built on, after all, family, and it's taken a pretty important blow lately.

They're happy enough inside, at least as happy as you can be after a war you fought as a major player. It's the happiness of salvation, this slow, melancholy happiness tainted with the memories of the ones who didn't make it. It's better than nothing, of course, even if there are nightmares and fears and thresholds still to cross. Most of all, though, there's the guilt, the guilt of being the ones who survived. Why me? They all wonder. Why me, why not the others? Why not my friend, sister, brother, son, lover, mother, father? Why not the next-door neighbour? 

And they wonder – was it because I was more deserving? But when they look they're dried and covered with dust, there's nothing deserving there, no heroism. Just people. And that's when it comes, the doubt: what if it wasn't destiny, but luck? Pure, random luck? 

Some people torture themselves with it. Ron never looks at Harry too long, because he's always aching, full to the brim with guilt and rage. The thing about Harry is, he's had to carry all those people for so long, now he can't let them go. He's their saviour but he's also their murdered. He's the one who led them to war. 

Ron thinks about telling Ginny to stay away. One morning they're in the kitchen, eating silently (silence has become more of a common currency in the house now that they know what it takes, what it means), and he opens his mouth to tell her. He's going to say, "Do yourself a favour, Gin. Let him go. There's nothing to save there." Yes, that's his best friend, but Ginny is his sister. It's not that one is better than the other, but if Ron has to choose, he prefers to save as much as he can. That's what war is. Collecting scraps. 

But Ginny, small, imperfect Ginny, spins around, waving her wand, asks him if he wants toast, too. She looks like their mother, like her future children. She looks like a woman. She looks entire. She's thinking, her eyes are far, unfocused, and she's Ginny Weasley, herself. 

"Yes, of course," he says. His voice squeezes past the muscles in his throat with difficulty. 

He doesn't tell her. She probably knows she should stay away, but Ginny Weasley the woman is still Ginny Weasley the child, and even though she doesn't need people telling her what to do anymore, she's still the daredevil kid who used to climb trees and scrape her knees playing Quidditch with her older brothers. 

He stands up. She's standing by the oven. Her bathrobe is threadbare at the elbows, and her nail polish is chipped. Her hair is tied in a loose bun, orange red. They probably look alike – no, they do. Brother and sister. He remembers watching her be born, and he wonders what she's thinking about. 

He wraps his arms around her. She startles, but soon enough she melts into the embrace with a soft sigh. Doesn't look him in the eye. 

"I love you," Ron says. It's squeaky and embarrassing, but it needs to be said. 

Lots of things like that happen these days, anyway. It's a common occurrence. Losing so much life makes you realize you want to say things before you're cold dead on the floor. 

Ginny doesn't answer. She means all the endearments, and he knows it, and that's enough. Learning silence. It's what they do here. Learn to accept George not coming out of his room for days, learn to not say anything when Arthur destroys every magic artefact they own, learn not to look away when Molly's tears overflow. 

It passes. After a while everyone starts returning home, if they have one, building one if they don't. George is the first to go. Fred and him used to have a flat on Diagon's Alley, and he comes back there alone. They all offer to help him clean the flat.

"I'm not going to shoot myself," he laughs, brittle and sick yellow. 

They're not so sure. They leave him when he insists he doesn't need any help. Ron isn't the last out of the room (his mother; his father) but he watches the empty shell of his brother, and once more his hatred for the war overwhelms him. There isn't any precise person to hate, because in the end Voldemort wasn't even that anymore, a person, and that makes it worse, in a way. He just hates in the void. In the nothingness. In vain. 

One of the hardest things about letting go of the past is forgetting this hatred. They have to surrender their rage to be able to be something new, and it's so hard, so incredibly hard to do. You wouldn't think, but for some of them it's the only thing they have left, the only thing that holds them together, and they're afraid if they let it go they'll just dissolve and scatter away. 

Surprisingly, Fleur is the best – and the first. She lets go of the resentment like she would a dirty rag. "It's useless," she says, and her eyes are pale and kind. Ron doesn't want to talk about heroes, but if he had to, she'd be one of them. He admires the way she's abandoned her precious persona to become a delicate, hard-working warrior more than he admires most things. 

She was one of those who stayed in the back, stitching everything – everyone – up, comforting the children. She hosted the refugees, made food, taught them how to fight, just a little, just enough. Ron remembers being enamoured with her and can't berate his fourteen-year-old self. At least he had good taste. He's always had good taste, hasn't he? he thinks then, and he looks beside him at Hermione.

They're the next to go home. They have nowhere to go, of course, but they can't stay either. They've tried to think about what they wanted to do while they were in mourning, clustered in the house and pressed together on the couch, consuming the first days of their long time together. It was easy enough for Hermione; she's always been hard-headed, sure even if she isn't. She hasn't put the war behind her – couldn't, even if she tried – but she's set on studying at St Mango's. Be a doctor, she says, and there are whole novels in her eyes, about how she wishes she'd saved more people, about how she never wants to be helpless again. She's one of the figureheads of the war, but Ron knows she still doesn't think she's done enough. She probably never will. She's like that, Hermione.

(Sometimes he wonders if this insecurity, this self-doubt, comes from the fact that she's – well. A Mudblood. If she thinks, however imperceptibly, subconsciously, she's half as filthy as they used to tell her she was. People don't say that anymore, but sometimes a remnant from the past is dredged up and old violence, renewed or dug up or emulated, still bursts in their faces. Like a firework. It used to look like that, the Mark in the sky. Green fireworks. Announcing death.)

It's harder for him. His life has been about the war for so long. Even before it broke out, there was Harry, fascinating, shiny new friend Harry. Ron's never been passionate about school like Hermione, and he's never been much good at it either. For years it was mischief and adventure and it's like a children's game that kind of degenerated until it came to a dark forest and his best friend's body in a giant's arm. Tears in Hagrid's beard. 

So Ron doesn't know. No one asks him to make a decision, no one pressures him, he can be whatever he wants, but they're waiting. Of course they're waiting. And they're right to, he would too if he saw himself, because moving on really is the best and only thing you can do to get out of the mud of the war, but he can't choose. There are too many paths, undiscovered and uninvestigated, and he has to choose now. He can't go wrong. He can't slip up. This is his life. 

And it's about so many things, Harry, Hermione, his friends, his family, but it's about him, too. For once it's all about him, he's not left-out or second best, even though he let go of these resentments years ago. This is his moment. He just can't fuck it up. 

So he chooses to be an Auror. He enrols in the new program that's starting next October, and he's accepted immediately. There's no questioning his valour, and he finds himself wondering if he would have liked them to, just to see. Maybe he exhausted all his courage in this bloody war. 

The night after he goes sign himself up, Hermione is waiting for him in their flat, sitting on one of the chairs amidst the boxes, a glass of red wine in her hand. Her eyes are kind. (They didn't even talk about moving together. Maybe they should've, but they haven't, and for now it feels right. It's more than they can ask for, really.)

"How did it go?" she asks. 

He wonders if she's waiting for him to say "I couldn't do it". Maybe. He doesn't though, doesn't say he chickened out in front of the building or even realized it wasn't what he was made for, because he didn't do any of these things. 

"Fine," he says instead. He filled the form, ink and all, his name in capitals in all the right places. It has a different ring to it, now, Ron Weasley. When he was a kid, at first, it used to mean 'this kid with the red-head brothers'. Then, in Hogwarts, he was still part of the tribe, but he was also Ron Weasley, the Boy Who Lived's best friend. He stayed that for years. For some people, during the war, he was Ron Weasley, the Hero. For others, he was Ron Weasley, the Ginger. Scum, trash, whatever they called him on this side of the equation of war. A Pureblood family who didn't understand purity. 

"I'm proud of you," Hermione says. She has an endearing habit of saying things that don't need to be said, just to be sure people hear them. She tilts the bottle towards him, offering. Quietly. There's peace in all her gestures. She's training to be a doctor.

"Sure," he nods, and he fills her a glass. "Thanks."

He goes to sit on the couch and she comes to cuddle up to him. He still isn't used to the way her body fits with his. It's not perfect, it'll take getting used to, it's new, peculiar, exciting, frightening. But she wraps an arm around his neck and laughs quietly against the skin, just below his ear. It tickles. 

"I can't believe we're here now," she says, like you would say _We made it_ , with gleeful joy and a lot of awe and wondering, too. 

"Me neither," he answers. "It's crazy, right?"

She takes a sip of wine. "Crazy," she repeats. 

It sets them off. They talk about – Ron's not sure he could say what they talk about, what exactly drives them from topic to topic, if they just brush past the war or delve into it, the death, the bodies, the grief. They talk about the future, about them too, and it's shy and hesitant and they both blush, him beet red and her soft pink. They kiss. They kiss a little deeper, hands in hair, they're teenagers who are adults because they lived a war, who have left their bodies behind. 

They break off and they laugh, they talk again, the city is glowing under their windows, the boxes draw neat shapes on the linoleum, a new life rising from the ruins, halting and restarting in hitches, hovering at the edge of newness. The wine makes them dizzy. Happier, probably. They think they deserve to be happy, though, and they probably do. 

When the night is fully dark, broken only by the lightbulb white of the moon and the glowing red of traffic – London City – Ron takes his courage in both hands, holding it like a ferocious kitten. _Come here_ , he consoles, cajoles. Coos. Stitches it to his chest, all the way inside. The claws make their way through the wool of his jumper. 

"I love you," he tells Hermione, with a heat in his words that she doesn't miss. She smiles at him. 

It's awkward when their mouths bump, because it's rushed, too heated for a kiss, probably. There's teeth and her laugh is skittering nervous, and then she takes his hands and puts them on her hips, like a permission. They're in their own house, almost adults. It was time. They'd been waiting for this, without really waiting. It was just at the back of their minds. Like a thing you might do if you survived. Hopefully. 

He kind of wants to give her his little kitten, to spread this courage on her skin, but she probably has a wild animal of her own. He vaguely wonders what it is. Is it – what, a sparrow? Oh, it doesn't matter. Her hands are hot on his chest, and she's panting, Hermione Granger in a mess, for once, and he's the one that put her there. She tastes like red wine, they're almost grown up. They did well, in the end. They managed their out.

She makes plans against his skin, breathless, talks about school and children the way only Hermione would do, and he laughs, he takes her hands in his. He fumbles. She bites his lip, a little vicious, catty, and then soothes it with her tongue. He's surprised; her smile is wicked, her hands at his belt. This is all so new. It's breathtaking, it's a gentle sea choking him. He reaches for the sand, hands on land on the linoleum. 

They fuck like that, on the couch in their little unfurnished flat, in the middle of a room cluttered with boxes, under the glow of a lonely lamp. It's the first time for him, not for her. He knows that ("Viktor," she told him once, and she looked ashamed even though she had no reason to be). He's scared at first, that she'll know better. But she's Hermione Granger. Of course she'll know better. 

They learn together. It hasn't happened much over the last couple of years – it was always her knowing first, understanding and then teaching, bent over the table in the Common Room – but now it is. She knows the basics but not his body, so he teaches her, and she tells him what's good and what isn't, looking away, down, her breasts heaving slow and pink. Her breath is rushed. 

He loves her so much it hurts a little, and when her back is taut, the couch springs pliant under her, she tells him she loves him too, drags him down to kiss him and wraps her legs around his waist, digs her heels in his buttocks. He hisses, puffs, closes his eyes. Her swollen lips sweep the ecstasy out of him. 

The morning dawns on them naked, a blanket hastily drawn over their shoulders. Hermione is a little shy when she wakes up, wraps her arms around her stomach and her hands over her breasts, but he says no, kisses her. When it comes to it he's quite shameless, and his love for her has always been part admiration. Crazy love, they call in it books. It doesn't feel crazy, though. It feels quiet, contemplative. It holds together. It's sturdy. 

They eat breakfast, disgustingly healthy because it's Hermione, and they make plans. That's what she's best at, it reassures her, so he does it with her. He needs it, too. He needs direction, and he doesn't let her take his for him, but he lets her help. That's what lovers are for, after all. She's more than his lover, though. She's his friend, too. She's Hermione Geanger. 

He's going to be an Auror in training, she'll be at Saint Mango. They'll see each other at night. She wants children, him too, they're afraid but they're also anxious to bring something to this world they contributed to save, to create like it is now. Maybe a proper house. The new Ministry is giving them an allowance. They have a few events they have to go to, they're part of this new nation that's being built, too. Hermione doesn't want to get too involved. Still, she wants to help the House Elves. She'll try and get the Ministry interested. 

It goes smoothly enough. As expected, Hermione does remarkably at St Mango's, and she comes home every night with her books and her cheeks that the wind whips pink. She scolds Ron when he distracts her by peppering kisses in the nape of her neck. He's less enthusiastic about being an Auror, but he trains. He's good. Not the best, but the others admire him, he works hard. 

They check up on the others. Harry is closed down in his house, still brewing his black memories, thinking about the corpses he abandoned when he could've walked back and maybe saved them. He thinks about his enemies. They drag him out once a month for a customary beer with the whole gang, but it's a parsed meeting. Sometimes people don't come. There are enemies turned friends. It's hard. 

Ginny stays with him until the next December. She tries, she really tries, Ron has to give her credit for that, even if he still wants to pull her away and tell her he doubts anything will save Harry. He was there, and what he saw is enough for a life of nightmares, so Harry? Harry must be going crazy, worse even. Insane. His bond with Ginny isn't quite as strong as Ron's is with Hermione, and it deteriorates slowly. He locks her out. He locks her out of his grief. Ginny stays on the outside looking in. 

For a few months, her face is closed. She tries to help him, bring him out, forgives him everything, the drinking and the slurs and the rudeness. He refuses to appear in public. He says they want him to help again, and he's done helping people who've sacrificed him so unthinkingly, thinking one boy for the sake of the country was an acceptable wager. Ron understands him. It's hard not to. 

Ginny comes crying at their door for Christmas. It's a few days after the official party at the Burrow with all the family, uncomfortable cheer and forced happiness. It's rebuilding, _they_ 're rebuilding, but they can't do full-blown joy yet. They all still need a little time in their corners, stitching up their lacerated lives and licking the pungent wounds.

"He left me," she says. She's crying. It's not wracking, frame-shaking sobs. It's just the quiet tears you cry when you're destroyed, when everything has been sucked out of you. When there's nothing left to try.

Ron opens her arms and she burrows in them, her head nestling in the crease between his lungs. Like when she was a little girl, Ron thinks. Like when she had nightmares. She's a woman now, and it's a relief to see that she still needs him. Selfish, but Ron's learnt that selfishness is useful, sometimes. More than that: necessary.

She sleeps on their couch for a month and a half before moving out. Ron feeds her, coddles her, neglects his training. Hermione frowns at him at night when she comes back, but she doesn't say anything. Family before all, it's always been the Weasley motto, and even if she doesn't always understand it at least she accepts it. Ron can't ask more of her. 

Ron builds Ginny back up as much as he can. It's become somewhat of a speciality, between the two of them, building things up. Life. Homes. Bodies. And now, Ginny. 

At the end of the sixth week, Ginny pulls him close. She thanks him quietly. "I'm not sure I can manage," she says. "But I have to try."

He nods. There's always the crazy instinct to try and keep her close, safe, itching at the back of his mind, but he pushes it away. She can do it. She's strong. 

And she is. She gets a flat in London and a job and it's not long before she has friends, a life. He's so proud of her he feels like bursting sometimes. 

In April, he stops the Auror training. It's sudden, and even he doesn't really believe it, but one day he goes to the desk and he fills the drop-out form. He says sorry to his professors, tries to explain as best as he can. He goes back home, takes a bottle of beer out of the fridge, and waits for Hermione. 

She's incensed, at first. She yells at him for being irresponsible and how can he do that to her, why didn't he tell her anything? She could've helped. She _would_ 've helped. He tries to tell her, he didn't know until he walked into the building this morning and just realized he couldn't do it, didn't want to, but she doesn't let him talk. It doesn't make it through. So he paces himself, he waits for her to be finished. He's red-blooded, he wants to shout back, but he doesn't. 

At last her breath runs out and here she is, standing with loose uncurled fists. She doesn't understand. She looks defeated. 

"It's not about you," he says, taking one of her fingers into his hand. He squeezes her wrist with the other. Pulls her close. "I'm just not made for all the violence, I guess. You know, I used to follow Harry everywhere, do everything he did. It's probably what he – you know, if he wasn't. Not me. Time for my own life to start, I guess," he says. 

He's always been bad at explaining, she knows that. Her eyes are warm and tinged with gold, and she sighs, soft. "Okay," she says. She sits on a chair opposite him, summons a notebook. "What do you have in mind now?"

He appreciates the effort, and he tells her that, but – "Can we not do that now, please? I need to think a little before I decide." He can probably make one mistake, but not two. Even if he's allowed, he's not sure he has the stomach to take it. 

She looks a little disappointed, and probably powerless – she's so used to being able to fix everything, even though working as a doctor is teaching her to accept failure, too. "Okay," she says. 

He thanks her. He sleeps for a few hours, wakes up to eat, sleeps another whole night. For a week, he doesn't move from the flat, only to buy groceries. He cooks a meal for her every night. She kisses him on the lips when she comes home and eats and compliments him. He's happy – even though she's still worried, he's good at cooking, and he likes watching her head roll back and her mouth exhale pretty little peppery sighs against his lips. 

He reads his books from when he was a boy, trying to remember what he wanted to be. He unearths old dreams, laughs at some of them, jots others down on a little leatherbound notebook Hermione gave him. He isn't sure it helps, but he's grateful anyway. 

On Sunday he goes to Diagon Alley. It's been a while since he's been there, and he winces when he passes his brother's shop. It still looks like it did when Fred was still alive; George is almost obsessional in keeping it as it was, keeps inventing new tricks and artefacts to sell to the new Hogwarts students. Another one they probably won't get back from the war, Ron thinks: another one they've been robbed of. 

He doesn't stop, though (even though he swears to himself he'll go in there soon and talk to him). He continues until the Quality Quidditch Supplies shop, the one whose window he used to look through in wonder when he was a kid, dreaming of a Nimbus 2000. He knocks. Someone says to come in. He does. 

There are a few people in the shop. A little boy runs up to him, his cheeks stained red. "Are you Ron Weasley?" he asks, bold and proud, grinning. 

Ron startles. He crouches to face the kid. He's not that much older than him, in the end. It's strange. "Yes," he says. "Yes, I am." It's been a long time since he's spoken this name with pride. 

"Can you sign this for me?" the little boy asks, handing him a book. It's a book about the Canons, one of the ones Ron used to have in his room and read obsessively. It's a new edition, of course, updated with one or two years of matches, but not that new. Ron's breath sticks in his throat. 

The mother appears at her son's shoulder, her face worried. "Don't feel obligated," she says, tugging on her son's hand to draw him towards her. "I'm so sorry, I wasn't looking, he won't bother you, I -"

Ron shakes his head. "No, it's no trouble," he says, shaking his head. 

"Here you go, mate," he says when he's signed the book, handing it back. The kid grins at him. 

"Thank you," the mother says. She looks him in the eye for a second. "Thank you," she repeats, and this time she means for something else, something he didn't do but probably participated in. He acknowledges it with a nod. 

He walks up to the shopkeeper's desk. "Hi," he says. "I'm Ron Weasley."

"Hello," the shopkeeper, an old man with a salt-and-pepper beard, says. 

The meeting is long and there's talk of qualifications and pay. The shopkeeper, Linus Holbert, isn't impressed enough with Ron's accomplishments during the war not to expect him to prove himself were he to be employed, and Ron likes that, nearly thanks him for it. Linus nods and tells him he'll take him as a trainee for a probationary period. Three months. "See what you can do," he says. "Maybe you'll turn out to be a crap salesman, war hero," he adds, a wry grin crooking his mouth. 

Ron thanks him. Linus waves it off. "Sell brooms, and then you'll thank me," he says, and boots him out, tells him to come back on Monday looking more presentable than today. Ron blushes. 

He tells Hermione that night and they make love in the big bed, trying to hold back their grins. It all goes very fast after that: Linus is suitably impressed, even though he doesn't show it, and gives Ron enough tips for him to become a truly good employee. The job is good, Ron likes it. Three years later, Hermione passes her degree and becomes a full-time surgeon at St Mango's. 

2006 sees a blessing and a curse. In November, Rose is born. Hermione's been pregnant almost all of her second work year, and it's hard but she's making it through, and she's not letting anyone step on her toes at work. People are getting less and less impressed with war achievements. They forget, as they're wont to. Ron and Hermione try not to resent them. 

Rose is born in St Mango's. Hermione nearly delivers her herself until the doctor tells her to shut up, calm down and bloody _push_. For once, Hermione obeys. 

Rose is pink and wrinkly and scaringly perfect. Ron holds her hands and it doesn't take more than a few minutes for him and Hermione to choose her name. Ron weeps, he's not even afraid to say it. 

The other thing that happens that year is Linus's death. They were all kind of expecting it, but it still comes as a surprise, the day when they're called to the hospital and the paramedics come out of the ward saying sorry. Ron mourns him like he did all the good friends he had, with tears and shouting. He doesn't like the quiet deaths. He may be an adult now, he's still a child too, a child with a child and a lion heart, red raw. 

When the testament is opened and they find out that Linus has left Ron everything, including the shop, Ron takes it with silence and more sobbing. He searches messily for any family Linus might have had, but there's no one. Linus had told him. Alone in this great big world. Hopefully not in the other one. 

He takes over the business, and the few couples of months are monsters of fourteen-hour days spent worrying about Rose, the shop, the finances. He faces bankrupcy for a few months, he doesn't know where anything is, Linus's death happened too soon and he wants to give up, but he doesn't. Now he's got Hermione and Rose and giving up just isn't an option. Hermione helps him best as she can, in her Hermione way, loving and practical, offering financing and managing advice. She has it hard too, of course, what with Rose and her invasive job, but she's certain they can make it through. Her conviction seeps through Ron's skin like a balm. 

And then, well. Life. They do make it through, Hugo is born, Hermione is big and full of life, the day Ron takes Rose to the shop for the first time. Harry sinking like a stone. Ginny surprises everyone by dating, then going on to live with Draco Malfoy, of all people. Ron doesn't trust him, probably never will, but he tolerates him for Ginny's sake. She's always been the wild one, hasn't she? he thinks dazedly the first time she drags Draco to a family dinner, his eyes rabbit-like and scared. 

The two of them live apart from the rest of the family, mostly because Ginny is still the odd one out. They don't exclude her, she doesn't exclude them – they just lead separate lives, and it's probably better like that. Being as close as they were before the war would be suffocating, a way to cope that would probably end up destroying them in the long run. 

Ron is still the one that visits her the most. He tries to do it when Draco isn't there; he might have grown up enough to not want confrontation, he doesn't want to see him too much either. He's surprised and glad to see her with Draco's son, playing together. She introduces them. 

"He's a good kid," he says when Scorpius runs away, chasing after a butterfly. 

Ginny nods, smiles, chin high. "He is," she agrees. She pours Ron a mug of tea, generous with sugar and milk. 

"Thanks," he says when she hands it to him. "Where's his mum?"

"Gone," she just says. He can sense that she's struggling with the idea of it, so he doesn't ask further. He would probably judge if he were to, anyway. How can a mother abandon her own son? There's just a big void after a question like that, a nothingness of understanding. He doesn't get it. He just doesn't. 

They chat for a few hours, Scorpius running around around them until he gets tired and goes to draw silently in a corner. Ginny kisses his cheeks and his forehead and he bats her away with his little chubby hands, frowning. She laughs. 

"How are the kids?" she asks. The smile blooms on his face almost instantly, as it always does as soon as someone mentions his children. He takes the pictures out his wallet and lays them down to show them to Ginny. She leans down to peer at them; she's a mother, too, she gets it. 

"They look like you," she says. "Redheads."

He laughs. "The pride of the family."

She glances behind her, where Scorpius is blond and still drawing. Ron's afraid of conflict for a second, but she agrees. "Yeah," she says. Pride is somewhat a foreign feeling since the war, anyway. 

It's only when the sun sets down behind the hill that faces the Malfoy's giant estate that Ron stands up. He unfolds his knees, cracks his knuckles, and leans down to wrap Ginny in a bear hug. "It was good to see you," he says. 

Seeing her like that, with children and a life built on marble instead of sand, gives him a strange feeling of being old, but in a good, reassuring way. Like an old book, Hermione would say. Like old wood, Ron says instead. Still holding the memories in, but growing sturdier, stabler. He likes it. 

"Wait," Ginny calls as he's heading out. She's almost glowing in the setting darkness, her hair a halo around her head, mater than it used to be but still vibrant like a flame. Burnt dust, Ron thinks remotely. 

"Yeah?"

"I'm pregnant," Ginny says. She sounds nervous but defiant, she's Ginny to the very core of herself, revealed once again by the tiny thing that's taken root in her belly. 

Ron crosses the room in long strides, flings his arms around her, hugging her tight. 

"Bloody Malfoy," he says between his teeth, but he's smiling, God, he is. 

And she's smiling too, he can feel it. She's smiling against his chest, and there's life all around them, glowing like candlelight, like the stars, like love. _That's my little sister_ , Ron thinks, and for a minute pride becomes a recognizable feeling again, and it swells in his lungs until he almost chokes on it. The starts are gleaming outside. He can't wait to tell Hermione and the kids.

If he were a potion-maker, he thinks, he would probably bottle this moment. The essence of happiness. 

*

"Bloody Malfoy," he repeats, his voice broken. 

The man doesn't say anything. He reaches to pat his shoulder, hesitates and then does it, once. He deserves it. They all deserve a little compassion, a little comfort, even those who have someone to come home to. 

"I swear, if you do anything with this recording..." he says, but halfway through the sentence he seems to realize how old and sad he is, and he sags under the weight of it. 

He doesn't close the door behind him when he leave. 

The man lets the recorder run on empty for a few minutes, inhaling the silence. Then he flicks the light off, shrugs his coat on. Hard day's work, that's for sure.


	3. Chapter 3

The third one bangs his head against the doorframe when he arrives. He apologizes, a blurry mess of words that mash together in his mouth as though he didn't have a tongue, and he says he's always been clumsy like that, awkward. The other man can see a few tears hanging like equilibrists at the end of his lashes. He doesn't catch it. It doesn't fall. 

He awkwardly folds his too-long legs under the table. He seems to fear the question. He inhales sharply when the other man says it, as though he had been prepared but it didn't change anything, in the end. The other man is satisfied, selfishly. The grief will always be new. 

"I – we were – she was the only one -"

He closes his eyes, trying to pick in the jumble of memories fighting in his head. His eyelashes flutter madly – he can't seem to stop them. He runs nervous, sweat-shiny hands on his face. The other man doesn't move. He'll talk. They always talk, eventually, even if they don't want to.

* 

"Hi."

The voice startles Neville – where did it come from? He turns his head and suddenly there's a young girl standing next to him. Why didn't he see her before? Is she a ghost? He thought he'd seen them all already. He doesn't really like the ghosts, they give him the creeps. He's afraid of a lot of things – that's another default of his. His grandmother always scolds him for it, says his parents would be ashamed. He always cries when she says that, and then she sends him to his room. 

"Hi," he answers. 

He hates his voice. It hasn't changed yet, and it's all squeaky and high. He thought maybe it'd change on the first year, but it didn't. Nothing changed. He's still chubby and awkward and socially unable. He hates himself a little. 

The girl smiles at him. She's got such a beautiful smile, he thinks. Actually, the whole of her is beautiful: her radiant red hair, and her lips, red too. She holds her chin high, and her eyes are wide, mischievous. Neville wants to be her friend so bad it actually hurts a little. If only he were cooler. 

"Are you a first year?" he asks. 

She nods, still smiling. 

"Welcome," he says. 

He doesn't feel really entitled to say "Welcome", though. He doesn't feel at home here, not yet. It feels weird, like bidding someone in a house that isn't yours, but he does it anyway. He would welcome her anywhere right at this moment, if he's being honest with himself. 

Something shifts in her eyes, and maybe Neville is kidding himself, but it seems like she understands. He thinks she looks smart, and he's a little jealous, because she's pretty and clever and he can just see on her face how popular she'll become, not like that awkward kid from Botanics class. He feels his shoulders sag and his grandmother's eyes burning the skin of his back. His eyes well up. Damn. _Damn._ This day had seemed like it wouldn't be so bad. 

(Sometimes the longing for his parents is so hard and so sudden that he finds himself wobbling under the weight of it, and he has to rest a hand against the cold wall of the castle to get his breath back. He hasn't told anyone, but he thinks that's where his asthma comes from. Missing mom and dad. Pathetic, but Neville holds onto it like it's a lifeline, hoping as hard as he can to never be ashamed of missing the people who gave him life.)

All of a sudden, as though feeling his discomfort, the girl lunges forward and hugs him. He didn't expect that at all, and for a few seconds he's a little flabbergasted, flails and narrowly misses falling backwards, but he steadies himself and eventually he hugs her back – a kind of reflex. Her frame is frail and alien in his arm, and it startles him for a second, makes him all flustered – she's a _girl_ , after all. 

He feels her smiling against his cheek. Her breath is hot as she whispers in his ear. 

"Welcome," she says. 

He doesn't let her go. 

It turns out she's not so perfect, and he likes that in a girl. She's beautiful and quirky and sometimes in the dark her hair looks like a river on fire; she loves her brothers to death and she also loves Harry Potter, but in a different way that makes her a bit incoherent and inarticulate; her smile is so bright it could light up the whole Great Hall, stars and all. Once she tells him that she sometimes goes to bathe in the Lake when there's no one there, her cheeks red and her chin fiery. He loves her to death: she's a great friend, the only one he opens to when there's no one else around, just the two of them and a stolen bottle of FireWhisky in the Astronomy Tower, even though he's a good boy, always has been. 

Along the way he maybe falls in love with her a little bit, but it doesn't really matter: it seems that about everyone who knows her does. In her second year she starts flying from boyfriend to boyfriend, and he doesn't really want to be one of these boys she's nice to for two weeks and then gets bored with just to taste her lips. He grows to think he deserves better than that. They all grow. He's not sure whether it's a good or a bad thing – it's a thing. It happens.

He still has problems with himself, of course. The self-doubt is crippling; his grandmother meant well, of course, dealt with her grief by trying to make him the hard-skinned fighter his idealistic parents weren't, but it turns out he's not really cut out for the job. Instead he grows into a coward, and the weight of her disappointment sinks like a stone in the empty slot between his lungs, never to be forgotten. He tries very hard not to resent her. 

Ginny, though. They go through so much together, sometimes it scares him to think that she knows him inside out, that she could undress him of his skin and find nothing there she hasn't seen, nowhere she hasn't been. Baring all your secrets to someone is daunting but with her it doesn't really happen like that. It's just that his secrets are born when she's already there, and she becomes part of them naturally, an occupational hazard that comes with being his friend. His first kiss. His bed-wetting fears. The cowardice he can't escape from, the shame. 

She follows her own trail, too, becomes different and doesn't change at all. He loses his grip on her once or twice, when she finds the journal, when her infatuation with Harry reaches critical levels, but he never really loses her. Every time he thinks she's going away, something makes her drift close and they cross each other's path again, an afternoon at Hogsmeade, a meeting in the Room of Requirement (yes, Neville knows what it is and where to find it, he may not be very good with his wand, he's not a _complete_ idiot). They're like patchwork. Some threads go loose, but they always stitch them back. 

In fourth year they go to the ball together. Neville asked Hermione – he has a history of hoping for unattainable girls, and this one is the smartest he's ever met. He thought for a moment, he has to admit, of what it would be like to have her at his arm, maybe to show her friends what they're missing when they don't look at her. She has someone already. He's happy for her. He is. They're beautiful together. 

So he goes with Ginny. She's beautiful, iridescent in her silver dress, and he knows he looks like a clumsy peasant holding a princess, but she's his friend and the only thing he feels between his hands is skin, skin and sequins He doesn't try to get anything from her. If his parents' death taught him anything, it's honour. Maybe it's a stupid ideal, maybe it's old-fashioned, but Neville is going to hold on to it until his dying breath. 

It's a good night, all in all. It's one of these moments where it seems to Neville that he's meeting her for the second, hundredth time: he discovers her in the shining smile that curls at the corner of her mouth, the way she fists her dress in her hand, crinkling up the gauze because she's nervous, probably staining the fabric with sweat. He reaches a hand for her. It's not falling out of love, it's not tottering on the fence between infatuation and friendship; it's something that doesn't have a label, that's defined only by the comfortable press of his hand on her hips, her smile when she looks up at him, and the laugh that brews in her throat when he steps on her foot and takes a step back, cheeks crimson. 

But it was only a matter of time, of course. Voldemort rises and suddenly their world is a world of terror. It's insidious, at first; Neville follows Harry because he does have a thirst for vengeance, even though it's silent and quiet. He keeps it close to his chest, buried until the right moment. That's the just the way he works: when he's sick he keeps his coughs nestled inside, and when they burst they're full-blown, wrecking his throat. 

Evil really _has_ been there, lurking all this time like Harry said. He uncovers things that make Neville – all of them, really – cower and want to run scared, and it's a shock to the chest to understand that they are the generation that's supposed to save this world. 

"No one is going to do it for us," Harry says, the scar dark and prophetic on his forehead.

Neville nods, but it's only later that it sinks in, when he's in bed, unable to find sleep. It means fighting. It means blood, it means a battle, probably, it means death. It means so many things Neville isn't prepared for. Bloody hell, he isn't even prepared for life! He's terrified of it. How is he going to make it through a war? 

There's not much choice, though, and he can't exactly opt out. Even the ones who do are just bidding their time, and they all know it. When the final battle comes they'll all be on their feet, fighting on one side or the other, whether they think it's the good one or not. They'll all be there, pointing their wands at children, men, women, and it won't matter who their faith goes to, in the end. 

So Neville chooses to believe. He chooses to believe it _does_ matter, he chooses to believe Harry, he chooses faith. Maybe it's not the best choice, maybe he'd have been safer somewhere else, but that's how it's going to be. He's going to fight for something, for the picture of his parents he keeps by his bed, in the drawer. For Ginny. For his children, if he ever has them. For all the girls he could have loved, for all those he could never love. 

He puts his cowardice in the closet. It's hard to close the door, and sometimes he reopens it, lets himself be weak and cower when the darkness grows near, when the sky goes aglow with Marks. But he does it. It's not an achievement, he'll realize later. It's a survival strategy. One of many. You see them all, when you fight a war like this one. You can't believe in good and evil ever again. 

Neville will never call himself a hero, but he does what he can in the war. When Umbridge takes the school, he tries to resist her as long as he can. He helps Harry with Dumbledore's Army. When the trio leaves, he even takes it over. He becomes thinner, fitter for survival. And through all this, there's Ginny. 

Even if they hadn't been friends, they would've been close. They're all part of the same thing, and most of all the two of them are Harry's most fervent believers. _Save us_ , they always pray before they go to sleep, though Ginny must think something else, something about staying safe and something about love. It's very easy to love her still. 

So he does. It's a background noise, the blood rushing to his heart whenever she's near. It doesn't impede on their friendship on the slightest; it's just... there. It doesn't wait, it doesn't simmer, it's there. It's a little more in his eyes, more warmth, more tenderness. Neville lets it flow with the rest. Even if he were unhappy, he wouldn't have much time to worry about it. The war is needy, and Neville is there to be careful that it doesn't get its share of bodies. 

They fight side by side in the Hogwarts battle. It's the most terrifying thing Neville has ever done, holding his wand right in the face of evil as his friends fall all around him, forcing himself not to cry and not to scream and not to kneel to try and help them. He looks at Ginny instead. She's beautiful and very sad, a war widow already, screaming as she runs to Harry's body. She's grown up, he thinks when he sees her face, ten years older; he chooses her anyway, his totem in the battle, keeping him focused. _I'm doing this for you_ , he thinks as he fights, and in her he sees everything she represents, the whole of the nation he's trying to save, humanity, every one of the parents and friends and enemies he wants to see escape this war unscathed. 

Molly Weasley kills Bellatrix Lestrange in front of him. It's a queer thing, all this fury, and it rekindles the revenge inside of him almost instantly, like a spitfire. He kind of wishes he'd been the one to do it, on the off chance that the green bolt touching Bellatrix's chest might have felt like closure, but he thinks he'll be okay if he survives. Still. It's something, stopping a heart.

(He never really remembers the battle now, only blurry images and screams, the weight of the sword in his hand, Harry dying and the immense, swelling despair in his chest, not only at having lost a friend, such a good friend, but at being doomed to live in a world crushed under the ruling of that man that isn't really a man. His future unravels before him. It's dark and he wants to die. When they win, he cries. They all cry. They haven't really won when so much has been broken.)

Neville remembers sitting on the ground after it's all over, his head in his hands, brain blank. He remembers it so perfectly: the stone was damp under his fingers and his hand was coated in blood. The only thing in his mind was the hard gleam of the sword as it split the snake's throat open, its limp flesh growing cold. The weight of a hero's sword. 

He remembers: people were running around him, embracing, crying in each other's shoulders. Screams still pierced the air – discovering your loved ones' bodies as the dust cleared – but over all it was the lazy victory, the snarl of the fumes as they dissipated and the exhausted, joyful communal sigh. Someone crouched in front of him, a face Neville didn't recognize, and started to clean his hands. Neville felt the need to curl his fingers and keep the blood in for a second, but he let go instead. This kind of instincts never leads to anything good. 

He doesn't know how much time passed between this and the moment when Luna dropped next to him. It's a funny thing about Luna: you never really see her coming; she always seems to drop out of nowhere and then she's here, her presence like the dissonant screech of damp skin on glass. Her dress was blood-soaked and hung heavy near her ankles. 

"It's over, now," she said, taking Neville's hand in hers. She counted the knuckles with her nails, one, two, three, four, five. 

It wasn't comfort, and Neville is pretty sure it wasn't intended to be. It was just a statement: it's over. It's over. It didn't mean there was nothing left to fear, no evil left in the world. It just meant what it meant. It's over. 

They watched the Thestrals walk heavily amidst the corpses, their hooves shaking the dust, and Neville remembered thinking it was another of Luna's legends. Maybe all the rest was true too – and at this thought something hysterical bubbled up in his chest, that he pushed down.

"What does your brain look like?" he asked. He doesn't know why he asked that. 

He wanted to explain, but she smiled, like it was a question people asked her every day. It probably was, in her world. "A hothouse," she said, and then pointed to the horses: "Everyone sees them, now."

"Yeah," Neville said, and it made him wonder if anyone had unlocked the dungeons and let the first years and second years out. 

They wouldn't see the Thestrals. They were still free, he thought, unstained, unscathed – or at least as unscathed as you can be when you live in the aftermath of a war, whether you've yielded a sword or not. They wouldn't see the Thestrals. It felt important, for a second, to imagine them walk into the room, hot throngs of red-faced youths, scared still even though the war hadn't waited for them to end. The hardest was still to come, though. They'd have to rebuild the world. 

"Are there flowers?" Neville asked. He surprised himself – his thoughts were so far, down there with the survivors, the ones who'd see the corpses but not look death in the eye.

Luna, of course, didn't miss a beat. "Yes," she said. She tilted her head consideringly. "It isn't necessarily a good thing, you know," she said. "Flowers. The Yri flowers just grasp at you. It's been know to injure some people severely."

She reclined against the cold concrete, open wide before him like a wound slashing open the throat of the castle. Like it was nothing, people being severely injured. But maybe she was right. Didn't injury feel like mercy, now? 

"Still," Neville said, and started to say it was better than the rest, certainly better than _this_ , but couldn't finish his sentence. 

"I'm not sure," Luna said. It's not that she couldn't finish her sentence as much as she took pleasure in letting it trail ominously into nothingness.

Neville took her hand. She didn't ask, didn't startle, didn't take her hand away. She let him have it, and it was the first and last moment she was ever a queen for Neville – a figure of reassurance and pride, a disdainful smiler looking down at him, granting him a few seconds of comfort. 

The hours after the sunset turned riotous as soon as the first candle was lit. Soon the whole castle was enlightened with all sorts of spells and more or less dubious artefacts; there were big bonfires burning amongst the ruins at the foot of the big staircase, as if to defy its wrecked sadness. People were trying to laugh. It came out hoarse, broken more often than not, but Neville had to give it to them: they kept trying. They kept trying, over and over. 

He didn't follow any grouping at first, contented in walking amongst the crowd and watching people huddle around the fires, families and friends and lovers. Everyone who wasn't dead was alive, seemed to be the motto burning with the meagre scraps of wood. Everything who isn't dead is still there. 

Some say that death gives people a more acute consciousness of what's still to lose, makes them more cautious and appreciative of life. Neville wasn't sure then, as he watched them tip throw their head back and push the grief away, and he still isn't sure now. What death certainly does is make people even more reckless – as if they had to continue tempting it until it finally gives in to their wish and extends a hand to draw them in. As long as they aren't damned, they're doing something wrong – because there's still a remnant of those times where death meant dignity and dignity meant something else than wasted flesh and breath. 

It doesn't really matter. It's not like Neville was expecting anything else. He stopped expecting miracles a long time ago, the first time his grand looked at him coldly from where she was sitting near the fire (a fire, another fire) and told him his parents wouldn't come back. He knows now that she didn't mean to be cruel, only wanted to protect him, but it's the only thing he can remember from that day. Her face. As though it didn't hurt her at all. He remembers the loneliness. When you're a child, you always think you're the only one hurting. 

(Maybe that's why he wanted to fight for Harry Potter. He never thought about it at the time – of course, he was too young – but now sometimes he wonders. Maybe he thought he could relate with Harry Potter when that's the only thing he was, Harry Potter, hidden under the stairs and shivering as he didn't dare dream for something better, thumbing the photograph. But maybe he's just a romantic.)

He loves them, still. There's nothing Neville loves more dearly, more profoundly than his fellow humans. He finds them stupid and petty and mean but at the end of the day he would do anything for them, and that's probably why he wasn't The Coward that day but A Hero instead, just long enough for him to slay a snake dead. Not a lot, but apparently it was something. It meant something. At the time, of course, it only felt like slaying a snake. You can't have everything. 

So that night, that's what he did. He probably could've slipped away, no one would have noticed – or they would've: they would've stopped drinking to ask, "Where's Longbottom?" and as no one answered, they would have frowned and come back to drinking. He doesn't blame them. He didn't want to investigate anyone's whereabouts that night either, for fear of finding them dead. But he didn't. He stayed. He watched the children slip in, wished for a quarter of second that he'd taken the offer and hidden away too, and then let go of it. 

He walked amongst them, offered condolences, reassurance, pardon. Helped the injured as best as he could with his meagre knowledge in biology and plant remedies. Did a few spells. Probably helped, in the end, maybe even saved a few of them. And then, when he couldn't feel his hands, when he was frozen with the falling night and the grief he'd been keeping bottled inside, when he didn't feel like a saviour anymore but just like a boy, a lost boy in a castle in ruins, he let himself be swept by the wave. 

And what a happy wave it was! Joyful girls and boys, all barely over eighteen, fresh-faced and plump with childhood. Some of them were emaciated, of course, that's war for you, famine and captivity, but they were plump to Neville. Plump with laughter. Plump with victory. Plump because they'd won and that's what they wanted to be, what they wanted to feel. 

They dragged him into an embrace around one of the biggest bonfires. For a second the only thing Neville could look at was the electric blue flame at its core, swaying from left to right and fizzling with life. Then he tore his eyes away and looked at the people. How he loved them, then. How he still does. 

There were too many of them for Neville to count, but he remarked the familiar faces: Dean and Seamus and one or two Slytherins who'd escaped before they were led to the dungeons; the girls, Lavender, Padma, Parvati. The older pupils: Katie, Percy (yes, even him, pale-faced and seemingly in equilibrium around the axis of his knobbly spine), Bill and Oliver. George wasn't there, but it was par for the course. When you've lost so much, you're George Weasley, sitting in the darkness and trying to call back a familiar shadow. 

And Ginny. Ginny was there too, first pale and grave and then, as the contraband FireWisky changed hands and streamed down everyone's throats, smiling wider and wider until she was laughing full-throated, telling a story from happier times with both hands. Neville looked at her from the opposite side of the fire, and in her face he searched for darkness, for Harry Potter leaving, dying, dead. 

But the amazing thing about Weasleys in general and her in particular, and it was at that moment that Neville realized it in all its amazing intensity, is that they can bounce off. They always survive – Ginny would, just as George would, just as Bill already had. The war had scarred them, of course – who hadn't it scarred? - but if there was a family it hadn't killed, it was theirs. They were strong. 

And their strength was there, in Ginny who could still be the life of the party even with twenty years dumped on her fragile shoulders and her war hero gone somewhere without her as the victory dawned on them and the doomed emerged victorious, tainted with the blood of the lost and the laughter of the survivors. Red and gold. The colours of courage. (But the colour of courage isn't gold, Neville knew that. The colour of courage is red, it's always red, it's only red. It's a pervading red. Courage means death, and death means blood. Courage means losing. Courage means hope. Red, always red.)

He started saying something he can't remember now, something about her and how he loved her so much, but he was swept in the beginning of a dreadful joke. 

"Hey," Dean said, slinging an arm around his shoulders, "do you know this one? A house elf and a troll walk into a bar..."

Voldemort was dead. Some called that night the beginning of the rest of their lives, some called it other things. It was still the night their army won.

They move on, after that, except those who don't try. Those who don't try are still at war. 

At first they don't really want to see each other, because there are just too many memories etched on the familiar faces, carved in the skin they're so afraid to touch. The faces of the ones that everyone misses but tries to forget are still there, lurking in the familiarity of the places they used to frequent, the rituals they used to follow. The others' faces are there too, the faces of the ones no one misses but that they want to forget all the same. 

Memory – it's a tricky thing. They do want to remember: because it's the only thing they have left of their loved ones, the memory of the moments spent together, their smile and their frowns, the way they flicked their wrists and blinked, so particular, so personal. But is it worth the pain? Sometimes it seems like the choice is an ultimatum: either letting them go or mourning them forever. They live in a barren, exhausted land, where nothing grows: they cling to the memories as dearly as they do the hopeful happiness.

It's hard, of course. They try to ignore it. They're human: their first instinct is to fight death, try to chase desperation. They want to convince themselves that there's still life where everything has been burned to the ground, a kind of resistant flower that would fight its way to the surface and break in a shocking pool of blue, yellow, green (not red). That's what they're about. That's why Neville loves them. 

But London doesn't feel right. All the memories are piled there like corpses, and Neville, the Coward, isn't a hero just because he raised a sword once. So he does what he does best, then, and flees. It doesn't _feel_ like cowardice to him – it's time they were all gentle to themselves. Masochism doesn't make much sense in a world so crushed with darkness, so smothered, so black. Take all you can get, that's their new commandment. The scraps. 

He goes to Northern Ireland and rents a cottage near the sea, lording over an abrupt coast of coarse red dust. It's beautiful, a kind of beauty he isn't accustomed with because it isn't human; and as much as he loves humanity, being there feels unbelievably good. Neville could say, in one sentence, why he rented it on first sight: only nature here to be gentle or cruel. 

He doesn't do anything for months after he settles there. The first days are spent dusting the place. It hasn't been lived in for years. It's surprisingly easy to settle into the silence, rustling with the distant roll of the waves and the swaying of the grass in the wind. At the end of the third day, Neville feels marginally appeased. 

So that's what he does: just sits there and waits for life to pass. He doesn't want to kill himself after he's survived; his grandmother wouldn't let him, anyway. But he cuts ties with her – tries to at the best of his abilities, at least. He sits outside the house with his head in his hands, letting the faces swirl around him, his parents, all those who died and those who didn't, Voldemort. Sometimes Ginny pops in too, her hair cut by a flying charm, bangs spreading in the wind in a thousand little flames. He doesn't cry. He isn't sure he knows how to anymore.

Some days are better than others, when the humid wind hits him and steals the salt off his eyes that don't want to cry, when the rain drowns him and tries to scrub him clean, taking all the stain away with it, swivelling in the mud. Some days are worse, the sun hitting his shoulders and telling him tales of death and despair. Some days pass without him noticing. Some days owls darken the sky and he knows that something is happening but doesn't know what, doesn't want to know. Some days one of them tries to deliver a message to him, often at first, then less and less until none of them even bothers to cross the sky and reach his red-tiled roof. He doesn't blame them, not really. Some days he blames everyone. Some days he only blames himself.

He gets used to not talking. His tongue feels heavy in his mouth at first, swollen with all the things he couldn't say before he left, declarations to the girls he loved like he loves girls, quietly, without concupiscence. He talks to himself for a while, tells himself stories that he makes up. They're all set in a world where there's no war. Death only visits his nightmares. 

The tales die down. It doesn't happen all at once; he just starts being more comfortable telling the stories in his head, and his lips seal up quietly, slowly. It's probably not forever, but it is what it is. For now, he doesn't talk. He doesn't feel the need. Months pass. His tears dry; the skin of his cheeks gets coarse from being exposed to the open, salt-ridden air. 

One day a girl comes in and sits beside him. She's got a flower in her hair and he recognizes her from Hogwarts, Hannah Abbot, a long, quiet Huppelpuff with blond hair and sparkling eyes. He feels a little embarrassed all of a sudden, makes a vague gesture to ask her to forgive his stubbly chin and reprised clothes. She waves his concerns away as if she understood them completely even though he's not talking. He wants to ask her where she came from and how she found him, but it isn't important enough to get him to talk. He beckons her to a chair by his side. She smiles and nods. Her long blond hair isn't pulled in a pigtail like it used to, it stops just above her shoulders, shorter than before. She sits and pulls a book out of her bag. 

She doesn't try to talk. She seems to have an endless supply of books – he catches titles, Nabokov's _Lolita_ , a choice of Shakespeare plays; a bit of wizarding literature as well, but not so much. She has a pencil permanently stuck behind her ear, and sometimes scribbles in the margins. Some days he itches to see. She figures out the kitchen and takes to bringing him tea and biscuits, sandwiches for dinner and lunch. Sometimes she knits. He gets used to the click of the needles as easily as he did to the song of the rumbling sea. 

He wonders about her: what she's doing here, if she hurts too, if she's hungry, what she would look like with a smile on her face that he's put here. The time passes and they settle into a sort of routine, wholly different from his daily ritual of silence and the occasional fit of rage when the ocean made him want to scream and beat the walls.

Only once does she break their unspoken rule about silence: she brings out a shaving kit, fully stocked with razor and shaving cream and presents it to him. He nods; she shaves him outside, carefully, slowly. The sun makes her glitter like a star. He hasn't shaved manually in years, maybe ever. He doesn't know how to think in order anymore.

When she's finished, she pats his chin with a damp washcloth. He shudders when the wind hits his bare skin. She laughs, a laugh that rings clear in the chilly air. He marvels at how easy it was to get used to her; she's part of the landscape now, as familiar as the old lighthouse that blinks in the remote horizon. 

She crouches in front of him, looks him in the eye and says, very quietly, "When you're ready." As though she knows it's going to be soon. Maybe she does know. Maybe she can feel it where she's holding his wrist, fingers held lightly over the rhythmic flow of his pulse. He nods again. 

It's weeks before he finally _is_ ready; when it comes it's like the last wave of a high tide washing over him and the sea taking its chains back as it ebbs. He wants to say thank you but he doesn't. Later, he thinks as he slumps on his chair. He's exhausted but he's clean, his sadness is a fossil in his chest, carved with the skeletons of old friends. 

Hannah is sitting next to him, reading the encyclopaedia. He looks at her for a handful of seconds, the way her hair is bunched behind her ear, her legs stretched before her, her chest heaving with quiet breath. He stands up. 

"Hello," he says. She beams up at him. Something beats harder under his breastbone: he'd hoped her smile would look like that. 

It's not hard at all to fall in love with her; it was half-done the day she walked in with her hair that wasn't red, her books and her dainty graphite pencil. They stay in the cottage until Neville says he's ready to leave that, too. Hannah kisses him on the lips. 

"It's okay if you're not, you know," she says, her eyes slanted and gentle. 

"I know," he tells her. But he is. He _could_ stay here forever, but he wasn't the only one who survived this war, and it feels selfish to forget them. He's not sure he could, anyway. 

He takes her hands in his, tracing the veins on the side of her thumb. "There's just something to do before we get back."

They get married in a little church in Wexford, understated and unassuming, just like the two of them. He reads what she wrote in the margins of her books while he was mourning and discovers that it's about him, little things like "He moved today" or "I could have sworn he was hearing music". He kisses her and asks her if she's read anything at all, in the end. She laughs at him and says yes, of course. They throw rice at each other. They'll have another wedding, later, with everyone there, but they need this too. You don't forget a year spent in silence. You just don't. 

Neville sees Ginny when they come back to England. She's changed – again. She never stops changing, it makes his head spin sometimes. Yesterday still she was standing at the front row at Fred's funeral, with a black dress and a veil, her heels clicking on the cold ground; the day before she wore a shaky smile as they won the war, unable to reach for Harry through the crowd but happy with the knowledge that he was alive, shivering, very young, maybe younger than the day they met. 

The day when he visits her, she just looks happy. 

He heard the rumours about her and Malfoy, from Hannah, mostly, but just like everyone else he dismissed it, thought protectively, "There's no chance in hell it's going to last". It looks like it sticked, though, because he's there too, shiny and relaxed in linen and cotton, an arm looped around Ginny's waist like he can't believe he's got her. Neville can understand that.

They all keep in touch. They're a group of children turned adults that survived a war, and it brings people together, you know, the knowledge that they're what's left of something that deep and tragic. They have coffee at a place in London: Neville rants to them about his teaching job at Hogwarts, and they tell him stories about themselves, too. Sometimes they're not all there, because they live all over, but you can always trust Ron to have a juicy anecdote about Quiddicth, or Dean about his painter friends. Ginny loves to listen to all of them, her head leant against the window-frame, startling up to talk and laugh every now and then. 

Neville and Hannah coo at everyone's children, patiently explaining why they don't want any of their own. Life feels very good and true; sometimes he fights with Hannah because she's irritating and jealous and she doesn't understand him, and other times he presses her against his chest, her breasts in his palms like flowers, spilling kisses on her creamy back and repeating that he loves her, he loves her, he loves her to death. 

Sometimes Ginny is irritating too, childish and stubborn. Sometimes she's ugly – everyone can be ugly when they're like that, especially them because they've seen true ugliness. But they're friends: you always hate your friends at some point or another, don't you? And they're the kind of friends nothing can tear apart, so it's not a little irritation that's going to deter Neville. 

Then she dies.

He's in the house with Hannah when he hears about it. It's an owl – he thinks it's impersonal at the time, but afterwards he realizes how hard it is to say it in person: "Ginny's dead" – and the letter burns deep scars in his hands as soon as he opens it. 

(The worst of it is that it's an afternoon he probably wouldn't have remembered otherwise. He and Hannah had been lounging on the couch, reading. The air smelled of lavender – Hannah's perfume. 

And then – the flapping of wings. Doom arising, and they didn't know. They didn't realize.)

He must have cried out, because Hannah is at his side in a handful of seconds. He's – he's kneeling, he realizes, kneeling on the carpet, crumpling the letters in his hands. What do you say to this? How do you respond? And the owl continued to stare at him, unblinking, probably expecting a treat. But who thanks the messenger of death? 

Hannah did. Tears were streaming down her face. She didn't know Ginny as well as Neville, but she fought in the war too, and of course she came with him to all these little meetings where Ginny was there, fresh and elegant and sparkling like champagne. She only asked him once. 

They were in bed, resting on each other like the human pillars they are. They weren't doing anything – not kissing, not reading, maybe a little bit of breathing on the side but that's all – just resting. Eyes half-open. Letting sleep stream in. Kneading the day to an appropriate softness, and then stuffing it under their pillows like a crepe, not to get rid of it but to treasure it, the little way you treasure little things. 

She opened her mouth. Breathed in. Breathed out. 

"Do you love her?"

They'd gone to the pub with her earlier. Neville can't help but still be a moth to her, even though her beauty is less radiant, more quiet now. But he hangs to her every word, drinks her in, watches her so, so intently. Half of it is habit and the other half is what Hannah is asking about. 

"I love a lot of people," he said. He couldn't lie. He couldn't say he didn't love her, because he does. He's even a little in love with her. But it doesn't matter. 

"It doesn't matter," he said, too, because she deserved it. He didn't want a life with Ginny: he couldn't imagine it and it probably wouldn't have fit, anyway. She would have crumbled and he would have melted away. He didn't regret it: it was just another hypothetical fate that had pushed itself away when it didn't slot in with the rest. It wasn't a big deal. What he had was everything he could've hoped for, the best option. 

"I love you," he assured, and leant in, slowly, to kiss her nose. She shut her eyes. When he was younger, Neville used to think people started to understand each other completely when they got together. He isn't so naive now, of course, and even though he remembers it with fondness he sometimes wonders – is this better? _Searching_? It's just that it's so much work. 

"I love you too," she answered in a sigh, and kissed back – or rather, pressed her lips against his, just enough to say, intermingled, "I forgive you," "Stay mine," and "I understand."

They didn't talk about it again after that.

So now, Hannah crouched in front of the window, and she was crying, sluggish trails on her cheeks. She gave the owl a piece of a sugar, a kitten lick of a caress on its tired wings, and opened the window. 

"Ssh," she said, waving the bird away. Ssh. Like people used to try and chase the plague. Like a prayer. Like things in vain.

So he cried. Yes, he cried. And the worst thing is – he knows – he'll get over it. In a few months he'll go about his life with her only as a background memory, popping in to keep him company on the slow days, when rain is dripping from the sky in little grey ropes. In a few years he'll need to think to remember where her grave is. A few years after that he'll stop going, and then he'll die, too. It's just what happens. There's no lying with death. 

The thing is, the thing about Neville, is that he's seen so much. And it's easy to talk about enthusiasm and hope, but Neville's seen more corpses than he ever planned to and it destroyed him like a slow poison, only kicking in after the adrenalin had deserted his veins. He's not saying he's unhappy, because he isn't (except now of course, kneeling on the rug and heaving Ginny Weasley's death out of his lungs and bowels), but he's not who he was. He's seen death so many times, and death, as much as people make it apart, is still like everything else. You get used to it. 

You can blame Neville Longbottom – he does – for thinking, somewhere at the back of his mind, that Ginny Weasley's death was sweeter, softer on him because of her brother's, and Harry's godfather's, and every single son and daughter and wife who'd died during the war Neville was unlucky enough to live through. You can say he has no heart. But unless you've lived a war, unless you've lived _this_ one, you don't have any right to judge. You have to soldier on, that's how death works. 

Neville, well. He'll work the pain out – he always does. It doesn't mean he won't remember, because he will. But he'll also allow himself to be happy. That's just how it is: as much as you want to, the world can't stay frozen because someone you loved died. It just doesn't work like that. He'll be good. He has Hannah. He'll be good. He'll be fine. 

He screws his eyes shut, a little theatre playing against the back of his eyelids; remembers the time Ginny Weasley came up to him when she was eleven, said "Hello" like it was a blessing and hugged the air right out of his lungs. 

*

"I -"

He's very still now, and the other man remembers what they said after the war, that he'd retreated in a house and not moved for a whole year. It's a man that doesn't deal well with grief, because you can see it rots him from the inside, starts to attack the skin around his eyes and darkens his movements. The other man wonders what he'll do after that. 

(He'll walk on the sidewalk with his eyes closed. He'll knock at the door of his own house and embrace his wife. He'll sleep the dreamless sleep that keeps watch over those who died. He'll go to her grave and he'll rest his forehead against the cold marble, bring her flowers and FireWhisky.)

Right now, he opens his mouth and he talks. The world spill disorderly from his lips, hitting his teeth, cut in half, hurting sometimes when they don't roll over his tongue as much as rasp over it. But he goes on. When the other tries to stop him, to say "Take a breath", he'll look up and say: 

"You asked me what I remember about her. That's what I remember."

The night will be advanced when he'll leave. His shoulders will look like they've been relieved of some of the weight they carried – not all of it, but some.


	4. Chapter 4

The fourth one's back is set very straight, schooled black locks falling gracefully on her shoulders. She looks in less pain than the others, maybe, but she's always been good at hiding those things. She has a beautiful face that screams Victorian; she looks like she's wearing a whole era of restrictions and slavery on her lips, and freedom on her forehead. 

He clears his throat. He didn't know her well. He remembers her from school, but she was younger than him, and less beautiful than she is now. He used to avoid her because it was a time when they pretended everything was black and white and she was on the black side. The pain on her face looks familiar – but maybe it's just an illusion. Maybe pain leaves the same imprint on everyone. He should know, by now. 

He wonders if he should hate her, but he doesn't have the strength to hate anyone, not anymore. 

"Tell me something you remember about Ginny Weasley," he says. 

Her elocution is perfect when she answers, words smooth and polished. Something foreign that he can't really identify seems to have slipped under her tongue, but he doesn't pay it any attention. "I didn't know her well."

He looks at her; she smiles, polished, baring teeth. It isn't entirely true. 

*

She did know her. Everyone at Hogwarts knew her: it seems as though everyone Harry Potter touched at that time turned into a celebrity and started constantly getting in trouble. It's still true. Pansy wouldn't shake his hand, even now – you could call it a sort of Slytherin sense of self-preservation. (She won't shake his hand, but she has coffee with him, sometimes, when they happen to be in the same place at the same time and his eyes aren't too glassy to see her.)

Ginny Weasley. She was one of the Weasels, always pratting about with their stupid hair, wasn't she? Unmissable. The whole tribe of them were infamous in Hogwarts. Not everywhere for the same reasons, of course: for the people Pansy frequented, it was as Purebloods who muddied their name by getting friendly with all sorts of people – Mudbloods and the like. But there was something, even at the time. Something about her. 

Not that Pansy will ever admit that to anyone. 

First off, she was the only girl of their idiotic crew, so she had to be smarter, if only by a little bit – no one could be as stupid as those morons, anyway. Pansy didn't know the Weasels came in girl format, before her; she half-thought they were genetically reproduced each year so as not to lose any occasion to bugger everyone with their stupid jokes and their mere _presence_. Pansy remembers hating them with a strange fierceness she can't really explain, even now. She had a lot of anger bottled in, at the time. 

But Ginny didn't hang so much with the rest of the Weasels, even Potter the Nutter, though she had a crush on him a mile wide, visible from space, which must be why Potter took six years to notice. Pansy almost went up to her once to tell her to do herself a favour and stop making a fool of herself. Almost. (It's one of those tiny things – sometimes Pansy wonders if it could've changed history, like the time Draco asked Potter to be his friend or a hundred of other minuscule moments that were so, so important in hindsight.)

She didn't, though. School, whether it's Hogwarts or not, always assumes many of the characteristics of tyranny. There was no mingling between Pansy's crew and theirs, and they mutually despised each other with the built-in diligence they didn't apply to their homework. In a way, Ginny was nothing more than collateral damage. It's one of the reasons Pansy likes (admires) her now, for having succeeded in struggling out of this poisonous shadow. 

(Everybody thought Pansy was in love with Draco back when they were in school. Maybe it was true. Maybe she just let herself be told that she was (she never lets herself be told things now – she's Pansy Parkinson – but she was young at the time). She was content with looking at his face, all graceful and delicate, his sharp cheekbones cutting the light and drawing his mouth in the dark, where no one could see his lips, shiny and greedy. She knew more things that they thought she did. She still does.)

But Ginny wasn't all good, you know. Pansy is tired of the good ones always being the good ones, no questions asked, no doubt raised. It's easy to say the world is black and white, but in the end it just isn't. Pansy's been shelved with the bad guys for too long, and it's probably not unfair to say that the "good ones" sneering at her was probably a decisive factor in her choice. But you've got to be careful. This was a real war. 

Once, when she was walking in the corridors, Pansy saw Ginny Weasley pushing a first year down the stairs. He hurt his knee and cried, his books spilling around him like a big corolla, the pages ripping on the sharp stone edge. But Ginny walked away, Pansy remembers. She was furious about something – there was red high on her cheeks. Pansy didn't blame her at the time, and she doesn't now. She walked away too. She let the boy's cries ring in the corridor, a tiny kittenish whine, strangely continuous, and she didn't even mind. But the point is – _that_ is Ginny Weasley. Pansy doesn't want to judge; she just doesn't want everyone to fool themselves. Look how well that ended last time. 

And it can't be a coincidence Voldemort chose her. Tom (Pansy feels like she's entitled to call him Tom too, after everything he put her through) never chose anyone by coincidence. It was one of his great strengths, why he was able to charm so many of them, this confidence he showed in his ability to always plan out everything so carefully, so meticulously. Pansy suspects he loved his mind-games more than he cared about their outcome. A real Slytherin, right there. 

He fed off Ginny. He fed off her energy, and look at what feeding off genuinely good people, those sickening idiots, Harry Potter and his likes, did. Nothing but trouble, that's what – there is Voldemort getting reduced to almost nothing by the power of _love_ , of all things. Ginny was different. She has something dark in her, and she isn't afraid to show it. It wasn't a hunch, either. Purely mathematical, all that. 

She wasn't like the others. Pansy knows what she wrote in Tom's journal (how does she know? Pansy always knows more than people suspect), how she felt, bullied by her brothers and stuck in second-hand robes. She wanted to be pretty, she wanted to be popular, a real queen, the little minx, a regular little princess. And when she grew up – she was a star amongst the Gryffons, maybe Harry didn't notice but other people did, and Pansy too, because Pansy notices everything, because Pansy is a Slytherin and she has ears and eyes instead of a big mouth and a too-quick wand. 

She was a bit of a whore, too. She went through boys like she did clothes (between third and fourth year, she started dressing better. Pansy suspects her boyfriends clothed her, but it wasn't her concern, not really. Griffy business), breezing through the crowds of them with rough elegance she made up for in vitality. Maybe it really was the hair that did this, that gave her that charm, vibrant and flaming. 

She wanted glory. She wanted speed. She wanted danger. She was a Gryffondor alright, all stupid boldness and cheery insanity, but it wasn't all she was. Who she was didn't just _stop_ there, as it seemed to for the others. Maybe it was all Pansy's weird fantasy (because she'd always been a little fascinated by this girl, much as she'd have denied it), but it didn't seem like it was. Ginny Weasel. She was something, she was really something, wasn't she? 

When she thinks about Ginny Weasel, Pansy thinks about that time she saw her licking redcurrant jam off her fingers, red dripping everywhere (now of course it's blood, blood in the creases of her skin, between her fingers, under her nails – maybe it was a sign, maybe it wasn't). She thinks about her kissing Harry Potter and then looking around her, hatefully smug, Potter not noticing anything, an arm looped around her waist. She thinks about which side she would have chosen if it wasn't already decided for her, if she had had a choice. She thinks about how life could've gone differently but hasn't. 

She thinks about the mornings at Hogwarts, fresh-eyed Ginny, bleary-eyed Ginny and, one memorable time, black-eyed Ginny. Pansy never discovered why. She didn't ask. She's smart, but at the time she was still a coward, too unsure of herself to question the others. 

She thinks about water rippling around her nipples that morning as she dove into the Prefect bathroom's pool with a sigh, looking right into Pansy's eyes, almost vicious. Pansy doesn't even know what they were doing here, how they'd found it (especially given that Pansy never found it again after that, no matter how hard she tried). It was a Sunday morning: Pansy opened the door and there she was, Ginny Weasel with her eyes that dared Pansy to kick her out, to threaten to report her for bathing here like this, naked and gorgeous, white freckled skin with spots of violent red. Pansy didn't say anything. 

(It was like an understanding, that's the impression Pansy kept from it. She isn't the romantic type, but it felt like that: electric.)

She thinks about the graceless tears on Ginny's cheeks when He started taking control, the last years before the war. About the little mean things she did but no one ever commented on, her extended feet to make someone trip up, the potion she slipped into Romilda Vanes's pumpkin juice in Sixth Year and that made her hair fall out, the way she snatched the Snitch and bumped the other Seeker (a nice guy, Larry something, nondescript, Hupplepuff), just lightly enough for it not to be written as an offence but violent enough to make him fall. Pansy remembers watching him plummet to the ground; she was looking at Ginny and there was a smile on her face as she watched him free-fall, his body lunging towards the ground. It ended up being relatively harmless, a few broken bones, nothing Skele-Gro couldn't fix, but it could've been worse. There was no way to know. 

Pansy knows Ginny Weasel isn't all bad. She did good things, and odds are at heart she's a genuinely good person, or whatever it is they call them these days. But Pansy feels that someone needs to set the record straight. She's like that. She doesn't like lies. She decides who to be. 

She thinks she's done with Ginny bloody Weasel after the war. She watches the others for a while to see how they cope with the pain, huddled rabbit-like together or isolated, alone in their houses, their cottages or who-knows-where on islands in the middle of an ocean. She watches alcohol replacing blood in some people's veins, reads in the paper about brains blown, people found with a wand stuck through their throat. It helps her not to think about her own pain – but it's merely postponing it, she knows. 

She tries to live in this new world for a while. It's all she's always known, the cold marble of manors, but now that the glory is shattered and the winner's camp does nothing but moan, she feels suffocated. Pansy has always been one for radical solutions, so she cuts all ties. She just can't bear to watch everyone fool themselves. It irritates her, this need to convince themselves that life is still possible somewhere else, somewhere that hasn't been ravaged, blown to bits and trampled over by armies, soiled by black, neutral blood (there's no traitorous blood, Pansy learnt that during the war).

She sneaks through the tight nets of discrimination. Of course, it's not because the war that over that everyone loves each other – Pansy saw enough of her old friend's houses being stoned and assaulted by wannabe avengers to know that. She manages to get a job at the Ministry by keeping a low profile. Casual humiliation by the water cooler, she can deal with worse than that, surely.

It's a strange, cold time. People want to forget the war but can't; with one hand they push it away and with the other they cling to it, afraid to make the same mistakes it they let it go. There's so much to lose, if they let it go, and everything to rebuild. Pansy wasn't on the bad side, really – from the outside it looks more like a case of 'at the wrong place at the wrong moment'. She wasn't in the wrong army, not exactly, but not exactly on the good side either.

She makes them understand that she won't cause trouble, and that leaves them happy enough. She manages to get muted to Japan, because that's what she wanted from the beginning – leave. So – in for a penny, in for a pound, and she thinks she could fit well there, black hair and ivory skin, blood rushed to her lips. 'Send cards,' some people say before she goes. She doesn't. She doesn't think people miss her – and if they do, well, it's their problem, isn't it? 

It feels strange but _right_ to immerse herself in this world of black-haired people, nothing but black, black, no flaming red, no pale, willowy blond, no faded chestnut, just black, Pansy's crowd. She breathes more easily in the compact thrum of anonymous bodies than she ever has in her too-big manor, trapped between the memory of her dead father and her mother's dry remembrances of the war. (She sends her wagashi, once, on an impulse. Her mother sends back a bunch of newspapers, _Weekly Witch_ and _The Quibbler_ included, strangely. Pansy doesn't send anything else from this point on.)

Pansy can't say it's easy. Nothing is ever easy, and especially not for her. It takes time for her to get used to the extreme hygiene and reserve, to the strange, exotic food, to the language, sharp and shrill. For a moment it feels like being even more suffocated, and Pansy wonders if she'd made a mistake in accepting the mutation; but in the end it works out well, for once. 

She meets someone. She can draw her with her eyes closed, now – long nose, black, close-cropped hair, lean, musical body, the strap of her stethoscope around her neck, thin lips, slanting eyes, the dip of her collarbones, the sweetness of her tongue. She changes all the variables – being with her is the answer to a question that's been gnawing at Pansy for a long time, it's warmth and it's the country more than Tokyo's buzzing streets will ever be.

She works at the Japanese equivalent of St Mungo's, Ryuu. Pansy remembers the first time going there, the big, garish dragon on the front of the building, with its mouth full of teeth and flames and red. She was blinded for a few seconds, taken aback by a kind of awe, a swelling in her chest that looked like an ache but wasn't one, was only wonder at such an animal, the power of its swivelling body and its intimidating ridicule. 

She needed to see a medic – a few vaccines, nothing critical, really, but she's always been careful with this kind of things, doesn't want to die of something as stupid as dragonpox. Look what good it did to the Weasels. ( _She should have been careful,_ a voice whispers fiercely in her ear when she's on the verge of tears. Gryffies. All the same.) 

She didn't meet Hanako for the first time there (in full stride, her longs legs poised with movement, the blouse flowing around her, hair in a tight ponytail, eyes somewhere else, with something else, far). Their eyes didn't meet. Pansy got her vaccines and came back to the office, lunch pause over, stomach empty and head full of clear, coloured sky (you can't see the sky in Muggle Tokyo, but here there is a permanent spell which makes patches of it appear at times, hovering over the city like a gigantic, unsolvable jigsaw). 

She probably worked herself into a stupor that day, like she does, _used_ to do, and then came back and ate a bowl of pre-cooked ramen, went to sleep with a book. She doesn't remember which book it was. She's been going through them at an unusual speed, since the war. She doesn't think about wanting to devour everything before Death devours her too and leaves nothing of her but a gaping hole, not even that, her absence, where she used to be (sit, walk, love, eat, so on and so forth, swift and regular like a wave in a deep, immense sea). 

She met Hanako later in the year, at the time the cherry trees blossom. Pansy still isn't sure if she likes the cherry trees. She doesn't trust red that isn't really red. She was sitting at a bar, _The Firefly_ , watching Quidditch on the television (the Japanese, Pansy has learned over the years, are a lot more Muggle-accepting than their British counterparts, and Japanese Muggles are very good with technology, apparently). She wasn't really watching, though. Pansy was looking – she noticed her eyes weren't following the players. Her hair was down on her shoulders. She was completing a medical file (Pansy knows that now. Both of them have this photographic memory, they keep things, file them away and keep them, preciously, dearly, pictures, vivid and moving).

Pansy thought she was good-looking, but then most Japanese women are, so it wasn't really something out of the ordinary. _She_ wasn't. She was wearing something tired, that's all Pansy remembers about her, that first time, the weary folds of her face and the strain in her shoulders, the need Pansy felt to rub them, unclench her somehow. It passed. It was one of these days – everything was very intense and ephemeral. 

It all happened some time later, Pansy doesn't really remember. One of them came up to the other and they wound up talking, going out, having sex, falling in love. Pansy doesn't remember their first date. It was something very quiet. The sun was low, dipping orange and red behind the hills – that's all she remembers.

She sees snippets and flashes when she closes her eyes, sometimes. Hanako coming back to the bed and snuggling up to her side, heaving out an exhausted sigh. The red around her eyes, tiredness, anger, tears – the time she threw Pansy's favourite teapot at the wall. The first lease they signed together and the way Pansy was genuinely terrified, and hated herself for it. The words spilling out of Hanako's lips, spilling and spilling and never getting too much, too far, enough to make Pansy walk away, despite the way she was waiting, patiently, almost with resignation (maybe hope) for it to happen.

The first time Pansy woke up after a nightmare, the sheet sticking to her skin, Hanako looked her right in the eye, and said: "It's okay." as if she'd lived this moment a thousand times, as if it was a pain she'd gotten used to. As if she knew it wasn't okay, the little, fizzling flame in her pupils. 

The morning after, at the kitchen table (they have a gorgeous kitchen. There is a little window with a view on a park, and teapots on the shelves, and everything is white with spots of gleaming steel and colour softening the edges), she said: "I've lived through a war, too". She told the story. The fumes from the tea were blurring the contours of her face, softening it, making it more forgiving. Hanako isn't the flower child her name thinks she is. She doesn't forgive easily. 

You know there was a war a few years ago here, Hanako said. A Chinese man crossed the border with a secret, a formula to trap the magic into weapons and focus it. Make us stronger, he said – but he didn't say who 'us' was, or stronger for what, against what. The Japanese refused to return the formula, or the man. It was like two kids in a sandbox, arguing over who had the toy first with treaties and grim-faced ambassadors, Hanako said, and Pansy could almost see them, little fleshy hands trying to grab the toy soldier, tearing it apart, beheading it. 

The Chinese soldiers came. They came like rain in rice fields, heavy and unexpected, warm throngs of them, swarming. They have red robes, said Hanako, chin catching a ray of sun, making her impossible to look at, strangely _adequate_ , and Pansy nodded gravely. Yes, of course, her eyes whispered. Red. You don't like it either, do you, darling? She doesn't use endearments, but this one felt earned, the war tying them together in velvety blood-strings, like a cocoon, stuffy and oppressing. 

Hanako was a surgeon already, twenty-one, barely out of school. They said they needed soldiers and she wanted to help, because she was young (she's young still, she says, it's just not the same anymore. Pansy understands) and she thought that fighting was the only _noble_ way to die, as if there was a noble way to die and not just horrible, painful and unbearable deaths, bodies writhing on the floor, spitting bloody foam like dying seas. So she fought. She took her wand and she killed people, blinded by the sparks and the belief that her country was right, that she was killing for a reason. 

But the war (she stopped to take a sip of her tea as she said the word, as though to let it sink in, let Pansy remember too) makes you grow old faster, doesn't it? A week feels like a hundred years when it's spent like that, hand poised on the wand, gripping it and shouting one Unforgivable after the other. You forget all you learned in school, don't you? _Be good. Love your kin. Be holy, son. Be holy._

What does it even mean? Hanako said. _Be holy._ You forget the holy when you're standing in front of a corpse, checking if he's dead – how could you not? It's so Muggle, so _Christian_ , that phrase: _Be holy_. So after a while Hanako grew weary. She asked to be transferred, wanted to save people instead of killing them, and they barely looked at her, did they, the bloody bastards, the invisible, proverbial 'they', they said of course, we need people picking up the trash, I mean, patching up the useless and the weak, I mean, helping our fellow brave soldiers, we need more people. It's a young lady's place. You should be there with the nurses – get a hat and go your merry way, little one, we have other affairs to conduct here, do you understand, important affairs, there's a country that's hanging on a string here, and it isn't a thick string, if you know what I mean, if you catch my drift, young lady. 

And so she went. She's like that, very Japanese in a way, she doesn't rebel, not outwardly. Her anger's very beautiful when you get to know it, the way her eyebrows arch up and her eyes grow cold like an arctic lake, her back ramrod straight. 

She didn't say a word for a year after that. She walked into the room where they kept the dead and the injured for the first time, and she thought, _There's no need for words_. Then she got to work. For a year, she sewed skin with skin, she saw red every day, the inside of men and women, bowels spilling out, head half-torn, long cuts across every inch of skin. Then, as easily as it had started, it stopped. Hanako didn't want to know why. She washed her hands that had been red for the entirety of a year, she breathed in, deep and profound, the scent of disinfectant burning her lungs, and she said, _Okay_. 

She told the story like that. Her hands were folded on the table, she was looking ahead, and Pansy _knows_ , she knows it wasn't easy. Hanako isn't good at telling secrets. It was at this moment that Pansy decided to stay. She hadn't been sure. The lease meant nothing; Pansy can escape from anywhere. But that day, she leant across the table, the wood digging into her stomach, she kissed Hanako, a mere brush of lips, and she said, "Okay. You can stay." Hanako smiled against her mouth. She knows what Pansy means – it's very strange. 

Things happen after that, as they tend to. Pansy quits her job and decides to study wizarding history, and she gets a degree from the best school in the country, the School of Wizarding History of Fukushima. She's very good. She wins prizes. She gives lectures across the world. She gets passionate about buildings and dead people the same way Hanako does unusual diseases. They fit well together. It's not everyone's opinion, but it's theirs, and it's the only thing that matters in the end. 

The truth is, she didn't cut ties with everyone after the war. One month after her arrival in Japan, she wrote a letter. To Draco. It said, 'Dear Draco,' and then some stuff about everything but the war and she doesn't really remember it at all, only the feeling when she posted it, like Draco was someone very dear but very remote, too. Maybe she could feel that he'd grown. There had already been the inkling of this growth in him at the end of the war, his long, tired face, eyes almost black because his skin was too thin and he hadn't slept for days. 

She doesn't want to apparate. She feels wary around magic now that she knows how deadly it can be, how horribly cruel. She kept a correspondence with Draco, though, though all these years. He told her about Ginny and his newfound happiness, the tentative grace of it all, the kids, the Manor. In return, she told him about Hanako, carefully. She doesn't trust easily. Slytherin through and through. Every spring, she tells him the cherry trees are blooming, and every spring, he replies by suggesting she come down for a holiday. Her and Hanako, he says, as though it were something casual. It isn't. Coming back isn't. 

This year, is letter says: _Gin likes to have friends over, and I'm sure the kids will love you._ (That's a bit of his dark humour – he knows she doesn't like kids, and they don't like her, never have.) _Mother had two houses built near the Manor, lovely houses, one for her and one for the guests so we can accommodate everyone, you know how she gets about comfort._ She does know, she tells Hanako who's reading over her shoulder, her hair falling on Pansy's shoulder, smelling of smoke. _She says hi, by the way. She'll be happy to see you – I think she's growing sick of redheads, we have so many in the house at all times, I'm afraid she's not really used to it yet._ Hanako drops a kiss on Pansy's shoulder. 

"Come to bed?" she says. 

"In a jiff," Pansy answers. She likes the domesticity of it all, as surprising as it might seem. 

That night, when they're in bed, hair sticking to their foreheads with sweat, curling at the temples, Pansy says: "Draco asked me to go back."

"Yes," Hanako says. Her naked back is pressed against Pansy's chest. It shouldn't feel this good, but it does. 

"He invited you, too."

That gets Hanako to open her eyes, but she doesn't move, doesn't stir, only breathes out a quiet, "Okay."

"Do you want to go?"

Pansy isn't used to being the one asking questions. Silence hangs in the room for a few minutes, maybe seconds. Hanako closes her eyes again. Her eyelashes are very long and very black. 

"Okay," she says at last, smiling slowly against the back of Pansy's hand. "Let's do it."

She's been to England, Pansy remembers, but it was before the war. 

And so Pansy comes back to England, scared and little and human, one hand closed too-tightly around the handles of her suitcase and the other on Hanako's fingers, dreading everything, the ground, the smells, her mother, Draco, Ginny, Narcissa. Draco isn't at the airport. He apologized in his letter. ( _I'm sorry we couldn't be here. Scorpius has dance practice, and Gin likes us to bring him, it's a sort of 'family outing', I'm afraid, as silly as it sounds._ )

They get settled in the guest house. It's beautiful: the walls are white and the bedspreads light yellow. There are flowers on the table; hung to the wall is a moving drawing that shows two dark-haired figures holding hands and running in a field of something blue. 

"Like a field in the sky," Hanako says pensively as she picks it up. It would sound silly coming from anyone but her. 

Pansy is wary of meeting Ginny, but in the end it goes well. They look sideways at each other for a moment, doubtful, full of schooldays memories. Then Ginny smiles, reaches out a hand. 

"Hi," she says. "Welcome back."

She's not the same person she was, Pansy realizes, and Draco isn't either. They both look less selfish than before. 

"You look well," Ginny says, looking as though she means it. 

Pansy thinks about what this would have meant ten years ago. 

"You too," she answers, not sure if she means it. Her voice feels foreign and unsure. She doesn't like it, but there are Hanako's fingers threaded in hers. 

The children tumble down the stairs, crazy-haired and laughing; further introductions are made. 

"Dinner is ready," Ginny says after a while, leading them into the living-room.

All in all, it's less scary than what Pansy expected. Ginny is surprisingly nice, not as sharply beautiful than she used to be – it's a relief. The kids aren't too dumb, and Hanako gets on well with Draco. It all looks a little too idyllic to be true, but Pansy revels in the feeling.

The night ends on the patio, with wine and light conversation. Pansy slots her chin in the nook of Hanako's shoulder from behind, looking at Draco and Ginny from under her heavy eyelids. She's still trying to figure out if it's all a trick – they can't get all this happiness now, can they? Do they really deserve it? Does _she_? 

At some point of the night, after a few glasses of wine, when she's all smiling and pliant, Ginny takes her hand. "Thanks for coming," she says, her palm hot against Pansy's. 

Pansy glances at Draco in the darkness behind them, smiling like Ginny invented the fucking sun. 

"You're welcome," she says, and for the first time she looks Ginny and the eye and she only sees the person she is _now_. Not a Gryffindor. Not Harry Potter's girlfriend. Ginny Weasley, and that's all. Ginny Weasley and the life she wove around herself like a patient spider. "Thank _you_."

The sun is starting to peek from behind the hills when they finally go to sleep. It's hard to stop talking when you start, and they had so many things to tell each other – every time they wanted to stop another memory resurfaced and they were back at it, mouths running wild with the intricacies of their destinies. They've done so much. Pansy almost feels proud. 

They close the blinds and draw the curtains when they come back to their room. There are still a few stray rays streaming white stripes over the bed but that shouldn't keep them from sleeping. They slip into the warm sheets with relish. 

"See you tomorrow," Hanako says, eyes crinkled with affection, brushing a light hand over Pansy's cheek. 

"'Morrow," Pansy answers sleepily, her eyelids already drooping. 

They eat breakfast with the Malfoy-Weasley household. Scorpius is complaining that there is no more grape juice, Nate is running around refusing to eat his cereals, Narcissa is sitting at the end of the table, looking regal. It's not as horrible as Pansy thought it would be. She thinks she could even get used to occasionally being part of this communal happiness. 

Hanako and her apparate to her mother's later in the afternoon (Pansy still doesn't like to apparate, but it'll have to do for now – she really can't be arsed to take the train to her mother's estate, it would take forever). They sent her an owl to warn her. Pansy doesn't particularly look forward to seeing her again, but since the war she's been acutely conscious of death, and this may the last time she gets to see her. 

It's a strange thing, going back to her childhood house with Hanako. The first breath feels like a punch to the solar plexus, the long smell of iris, and she tightens her hold on Hanako's hand on instinct, not to fall.

"You're okay," Hanako says. 

Pansy breathes out. 

They make their way to the parlour. Pansy explains the house to Hanako, the corridor she was afraid of when she was a child because there were monsters loitering in the darkness, the vase with the irises on the console table that's been there for as long as Pansy can remember, the big paintings of her flower-named ancestors in the staircase. Hanako nods, doesn't let go of her hand. 

Pansy stops when they finally reach the parlour. The doors are still the same, late 18th century French, delicate curlicues carved in the golden-tinged wood. _Be not afraid_ , Pansy remembers from far away, being taught about honour and pride. She raises a hand. Knocks. 

"Come in," the voice comes from inside the room. 

Pansy closes her eyes and leans in to peck Hanako on the lips. _I love you_. Hanako squeezes her hand one more time, and lets it go. 

Pansy opens the door. 

Her mother – her mother hasn't changed. She's lying Roman-like on her couch, like she used to when Pansy was a child and Pansy would come and nestle against her stomach, brush her fingers over the bangles on her wrists and play with her hair, and ask her to tell the story of how she got each of her rings. The memories overflow her suddenly, it's an onslaught; Pansy staggers, reeling. 

"Pansy," her mother says. She smiles a little, uncovering a wrinkle at the corner of her mouth. 

They've been angry at each for so long. Rose never understood why Pansy chose to side with Potter in the end (not fight with him, of course, but support him from the sidelines, and stop believing in Voldermort), and after that it was misunderstanding after misunderstanding. Why did Pansy want to work for the Ministry? Why didn't she want to stay here, help everyone? Why did she want to run? Rose hadn't raised a coward, had she? Pansy is proud, she didn't explain. That's what's been standing between them for all these years, really – Rose never forgave her for leaving. 

"Mother," Pansy breathes. Hanako brushes her knuckles against her hip, appeasing. 

Rose clears her throat. "Come sit," she says, motioning to the armchairs facing her couch. 

They obey. Pansy feels dazed; her head is buzzing. A vague need to vomit is hovering in her throat. 

"Have madeleines," Rose says, showing them the silver plate and the artistically disposed pastries on the table. A pot of tea is smoking quietly on a tray. 

_Her voice is still the same_ , Pansy thinks. Her brain can't seem to go further than that. 

"Thank you," Hanako says politely, seizing a madeleine between two fingers. 

Silence hangs over them for a moment.

Pansy tries to catalogue the changes on her mother's face to calm herself down: the white streaks in her hair, the wrinkles around her eyes, the faded grey of her eyes. 

"How have you been, darling?" Rose asks, her voice fragile. She's never been a tyrant, but she's good at disappointment, and it's probably her deadliest weapon. 

"I'm – fine," Pansy says, voice catching in her throat, hoarse. "But I – Mother, this is Hanako, my partner."

Rose raises an eyebrow but doesn't ask. She never asks. She always assumes. She reaches out a long, pale hand. "Very nice to meet you," she says, the rings clinking when her fingers dangle in the air. "I'm Rose."

"Likewise," Hanako says, taking the outstretched hand. 

The conversation flows better after that, but it's still uneasy. There's resentment on both ends, and they can't take back the years of silence, can't pretend to understand each other anymore. But missing each other, it's – it isn't born out of rationality, it's deep and instinctive and animal. It's Pansy's _mother_. She's hers like her body is hers, like the language she speaks is hers; sometimes she doesn't understand it, sometimes she feels estranged from it, but it's something she'll always be faithful to, because it's what makes her who she is. Pansy Parkinson. 

She won't say she misses her. They're not a family who says these things, they never have been. That's why Pansy understands Draco and his porcelain mother, and together they can be thankful for Hanako and Ginny who make them talk in such different, beautiful ways. But this wound is too old to mend. They won't talk. They won't reconcile. Ship sailed, it's just too late. 

Still. 

They reach to take a madeleine at the same time, and their hands brush. Pansy startles as though she'd been hexed. Rose looks at her through her eyelashes, her eyes full of something between regret and reproach. Maybe wistfulness – she's always been so very good at it. 

The afternoon passes easily enough: Rose tells them about her socialite friends, the garden party they organize every month, the charities they belong to, and in exchange Pansy talks about her work at the University, her current project on the concept of war heroism in occidental culture. Rose doesn't ignore Hanako, but she doesn't go out of her way to learn more about her either. It's more than Pansy had expected, but she can't help but let it hurt anyway, just a little sting near her heart. Bloody Weasleys, contaminating everyone with their foolish optimism.

Rose sees them to the chimney when they leave. Pansy watches her walk, her long purple dress fluttering at her ankles. She has this aristocratic elegance that's common to the women of her rank – it's something Pansy's always admired about her, the way she moves like the air agrees with her and parts to let her walk. It feels like quiet royalty, the freedom she was never allowed taken anyway in the easy flow of her hair on her shoulders and the fabric on her hips. 

"Thank you for visiting," she says, applying a pink-lipped kiss to the air near Pansy's cheek. 

Pansy touches her shoulder with light fingers. Rose doesn't startle. "Thank you for receiving us," she says. 

Rose nods. Hanako thanks her as well, and then they're stepping into the fireplace and getting ready. 

"Thank you for the pastries," she hears distantly as they're pulled forward, the gravitational force pulling at their bellybuttons. 

She tries to wipe her eyes surreptitiously; if Hanako catches her, she doesn't say anything, just squeezes her hand tighter.

They stay a few more days with Pansy and Draco, even go into London with them on Tuesday night to have drinks the rest of the group (it's slightly awkward, but Draco is there, as well as a few other ex-Slytherins, so it's mostly okay, though Ron _does_ seem a bit overwhelmed), but in the end their home is back in Japan. They fold the yellow bedspreads and hug the children tight, promising to send gifts. 

Pansy accepts Narcissa's weak-wristed hug, fitting her body under the long bones. Narcissa sighs softly, brushing a finger along her cheek. She smells of lemon and sun. 

"You're a prodigal child," she says with distant eyes. Pansy doesn't answer, waits for her to say something more – but she doesn't. 

"Goodbye," Pansy says as she steps into the green fire, her eyes wrapping the entire family. They wave back at her, and disappear. 

It's not that everything changes after that – it doesn't. But life is made of tiny shiftss, and they welcome this one like a bird, in their nest of open fingers. They start coming back to England every other holiday. No one protests – they waltz in the Malfoy-Weasley living-room to cheers of joy or quiet, welcoming silence. They even buy a house near the Manor, lost deep in the thick forest where the trees look down at them and humans are afraid to wander. In the hum of the near-silence, they have citrus tea on the terrace, barefoot on the warm tile. 

Sometimes Ginny and Pansy go on walks and they talk about everything, life, Ginny's children and Hanako and Draco and the rest, the things they don't tell, the humid, quiet sounds of the forest, sex, the war. They've both changed. Age has melted Ginny's sharpness and made her easier to talk to, less haughty than she used to be, throwing her mane of red hair around and collecting boyfriends like a reward. She feels good to be around. She's even cut her hair – she's less threatening like that, less impressive maybe. 

Pansy recommends a baby-sitter for the boys – she met a young girl in the neighbourhood who turned out to be interested in Wizarding History and she's been sending her her lectures since. She's a bright young thing, Katrina, she'll be perfect. Nate will love her, you'll see. Hanako has been sick a lot, this year, but she'll get better. We fought. We fight sometimes. You and Draco, going strong as ever, huh? I'll never get around the pair of you. So peculiar. 

Japan is beautiful at this time of the year, you should come sometime, the apartment isn't big but you'll come when the kids are older, drop them at Ron and Hermione's place and apparate over to the country of the Rising Sun, right? I woke up in her arms, yesterday. I don't trust red that isn't really red. The war doesn't haunt me as much as it used to. I kind of like the memories. I'm old, aren't I? God, I'm old. Don't laugh, Gin – Gin, how strange to have a nickname for _you_ , of all people.

And they hug every time it's time to go back, and Ginny adds PSs to Draco's letters and gets the kids to sign as well, and there are photos and _We miss you_ s and it's friendship, it is. It's Ginny Weasley ten years after the war and Pansy is her friend. She tells Hanako, sometimes, at night, when they're drowsing in front of indiscriminate reality TV programmes, whispers, _I can't believe it_. Hanako smiles in her hair. 

And then Ginny falls ill. Pansy can't keep from thinking that it's their fault, they've been too happy and now this god she doesn't believe in is getting back at them. Draco tells them not to come at first, they'll be okay, he'll get her to the hospital, they'll fix this. It's just dragonpox. It can't be fatal, right? Right? 

But one doctor appointment turns into three turns into ten, and soon Draco and Ginny start spending all their time at St Mungo's. Nostalgia-thirsty paparazzi snap shots of them tumbling out, harried and grey-faced, Ginny grimacing as she pauses to breathe. To Pansy, the pictures are like a punch in the chest. Draco just sues the magazine. 

After three months of this, Pansy sends Draco a letter announcing that they're coming. Draco must sense that there's no point in trying to stop her; he doesn't reply. Pansy decides to take it as a yes. 

The sky isn't grey when they get to the Manor. Nothing is different, actually – the colours are ripe in the sky and in the field outside, red and pink and orange dripping on the golden green. Pansy feels a dry heave rise in her throat. Hanako's fingers close on her arm, nails digging in. 

Narcissa is almost transparent. She's always looked like a ghost, but today Pansy wouldn't be surprised to see a sunray beam through her and turn her to dust. She leads them to Ginny's room (she's been staying there since the doctors at St Mungo announced that there was nothing to do but wait; Draco is making specialists come from all over the world to try and save her). 

Pansy knocks. 

"Come in," says Draco's withered voice. 

Damn you for loving this lot, Pansy admonishes herself when she sees Ginny. It's more painful that she'd imagined it would be, a hundred, a thousand times more painful. She's smiling weakly at Pansy, her bony hands folded on her stomach; the red in her hair is faded and cold; her eyes seem in constant danger of falling shut.

"Hi," she says, but it's more like a whisper. 

Pansy's got no words to give back. She should probably be supportive, pretend that everything is okay – but she's never been good at that. Pretending. Giving back. Anger sweeps her up and rips her open. 

"I'm sorry," she says, covering her eyes with a hand. Red stops are blinking in the darkness behind her eyelids. "I can't do this."

She doesn't even wait for Ginny's answer before she storms out of the room. Hanako doesn't follow. 

She slumps against the corridor wall, breathing heavily. _Fuck_. Here she is, ten years later, falling for people who don't even get their vaccines done... and death, still, death, as though it hadn't taken its fill, then – still reaping too early, as much of an ironic bastard as ever. No, she can't deal with this. 

But she has to, so she does. Life isn't a Lifetime movie, it's been a long time since she's learned that – so she breathes in, out, out, in, and she goes back into the room. She deals. She doesn't apologize, because it isn't something she does, but she deals. It's the most she can do. 

The day Ginny Weasley dies is a black day. Who would have guessed. It doesn't even have the decency to rain in England; Pansy shouts at the blue sky until she's hoarse, her jaw cement-hard. She's not the type to shout, usually. She's a silent mourner. 

(A whispered conversation: 

"She's dead? Hanako. Hanako. Gin is dead."

More tears. "Cry, darling, dear.")

It's a new war. Softer, more silent, like a placid dream.

For once, Pansy Parkinson lets herself cry. That's what you do when a war ends, right? Whether it's won or lost. Maybe that's all they've learnt through the years. How to cry. 

*

She looks up at him. 

"She wasn't all good, you know."

She grinds her teeth when he starts shouting. She knew he would, but she couldn't let it unsaid, as much as she may have wanted to. Someone needed to say it, and no one else was going to. It doesn't make her happy, but the war has taught her that peace doesn't often feel good. It sits heavy in your bones – it makes the marrow into lead. Maybe she should have been more careful, she thinks as he slams the door behind her.

He's too broken to realize, she thinks, walking on the pavement with her hands deep in her pockets, throat hurting with the tears she doesn't cry. They should know that she was human, too. They should know that she was _real_. 

But it doesn't matter, now. She's done the right thing (has she?). Hanako is waiting for her in their beautiful kitchen, ready to let her drop her head in her lap and cry, lips shaking around a mouthful of tears. It'll probably be okay.


	5. Chapter 5

The fifth one is humming when she walks in, a little melody that slips from her lips and tumbles prettily on her summer dress, even though it isn't summer. She doesn't sit immediately. He wonders what she will say.

"Good morning, George Weasley," she says when she's puttered around the room, setting items she gets out of her bag in different, if not exotic, places. 

Figures, she would say that. 

"Good morning, Luna Lovegood," he answers, tipping her an imaginary hat. 

They didn't each other so well, now that he thinks of it. It's a shame, she'd have been such an interesting person to know, especially for – but well. Now it's not an option anymore, is it? Luna Lovegood.

"We can start whenever you want," he tells her, sneaking a glance to where she's sitting, her hands crossed over her knees. Her dress is yellow. It's funny how you never notice how pretty people are when you're fighting with them, only how beautiful. George isn't sure he likes the renewed divide. She certainly _is_ very pretty, though. 

"We've already started," she says. 

He believes her – she sounds like someone he should believe in, even though belief has never been his strong suit. She's crazy enough to be worth it. He switches the recorder on. 

" _Now_ we have," he says. He tilts her an apologetic smile and, "What do you remember about Ginny Weasley?"

*

It's not about remembering, for Luna. Remembering is for something that's gone, something that passed away, and the thing about Luna is that everything always stays with her, nestled against the knobs of her spine. She doesn't mind; she welcomes them, more than anything. It's just not remembering. It's living. There's not a second of living Luna would waste to remembrance. 

So here. Ginny Weasley. Comprehensive history. 

Last Ginny Weasley to have ever been seen by Luna Lovegood: during the Battle of Hogwarts, to Luna's right. No one is lesser than another when they fight, except maybe the cowards, and even that Luna would argue against. There's nothing majestic about Ginny Weasley the day of the Battle of Hogwarts. Nothing proud. Nothing regal. 

She's – well, she's a girl with smattered blood on her cheeks, her eyes war-red, and she's holding her wand like a sword. A cloak of auras swirl around her, and Luna regrets being the only one who sees them. But it's not about seeing. It's about believing, of course; if there's anything her parents taught her, it's that. 

There's a thing in this little group she sort of belongs to where only a few of them have moms. Luna wondered, when she first realized how many of them were single-fathered, big-housed and kind-of-alone, if there had been an epidemic. An exodus of mothers. 

(In the end, she realized there wasn't. No explanation, just death. The thing about believing is that when you start, it's hard to make the difference between reality and what you just wished for a little too hard. The reality of belief is hard to ascertain, which is probably – at least in Luna's opinion – why so many people give up on it.)

So that's the last Ginny Weasley. Revenge, war, fire, all you want. Sinews at the back of her feet pressed against the sharp marble edge of the stairs, killing blindly. Not a child, of course, but that's hardly a sign of majesty: they all stopped being children the first time they picked up their wands intending to kill. Again. Funny how childhood ends. You think it's a slow decay, adolescence and then the last remnants of baby fat melting off your cheeks, but really it's just picking a wand up. One decision. One gesture. And there, there's no child inside you anymore. You're a grown-up. It really is terrifying, if you ask Luna. 

Luna tried to talk to the Last Apparition of Ginny Weasley. She wasn't in a state to talk, though – was watching the corpse of Harry Potter (which, incidentally, is something Luna was so very sad about. Harry Potter had been one of her friends, and seeing him like this, taken away like a mum, was on the short side of unbearable) in the remote horizon, fighting for family and love. 

She doesn't remember what she said. Probably not something about making it through, which would explain why Ginny didn't hear her. 

The first – no, wait, the _second_ time Luna Lovegood saw Ginny Weasley was a proportionally long time ago. Proportionally because, well, wars do tend to make time long, but it wasn't actually long ago. What, sixteen years? Luna doesn't count in years. She counts only in things that matter, like moons and harvests. What's a year? 

Not a lot of moons between the first and the last incarnation of Ginny Weasley. Of course, by 'last' Luna doesn't mean _last_. She means, in the war. Last is a word only made for war. With death, Luna uses words like 'later' and 'somewhere else'. Ginny is on vacation. They can't see her, they just can't see her, that's all. Maybe she's even with Luna's dad, though Luna doubts they would get on very well. She's always been a bit sceptical of the Muggle belief that all the dead people end up in one place. It must be getting very cramped – and anyway, if a Weasley family can fit in a tent, death can certainly accommodate all these people in different houses. 

But where was she? Yes, the second time. 

The second time was at Hogwarts, of course. During the Sorting. Luna was sat somewhere at her table, talking to – her prospective friends, still, future warriors –, watching everybody get sorted. It's always an amazing thing, only you don't really get it the first time, because you're too afraid of being the next one called. Imagine, standing there, in front of everyone! Someone decides your fate! If Luna had known what arbitrary meant at the time, it's probably what she would've thought of it. 

But. The sorting. Wee little children with shaky knees sitting on the stool, hat placed on their heads – and thus coiffed, chosen. It's all very traditional and impressive; Luna was munching on her bread, thinking about the pumpkin pie, but she was watching. Luna is one of those people who can not only do two things at once, but regularly ends up doing twenty. She's a bit distracted for one or two of them, of course, but globally it's worth-it. 

And there they were, one after the other, fist-sized heads disappearing under the hat, blah blah blah, Gryffindor for courage and Slytherin for cunning, we all know the drill, when this little thing walks up the aisle. Not very afraid. Nothing special, mind you, if not for the burning red head, branding him? her? 'one of the Weasleys'. You can be a red head and not be a Weasley in Hogwarts, of course, but then you don't have this specific hair colour that Luna has named in her head 'highlight carrot'. She means it in a completely peaceful way. She loves carrots. 

There goes the kid, the room pays a little bit more attention, but it's not like anyone expects her – no, it's definitely a her – to be sent to Hupplepuff. So everyone falls back on their plates after the hat says "Gryffindor" after approximately zero second of hesitation. Luna thinks it's a bit prejudiced. 

(She'll learn more about prejudice during her seven years in Hogwarts that she has her whole life before. After the Battle, the definition will be branded in her brain along with its examples. If Luna was a dictionary, the 'prejudice' entry would be underlined, the page dog-eared and stained with black, smelly coffee. Yes, that serious.)

Luna goes back to thinking about the pie. You never get pie like this on any other day of the year, except for Christmas. So she's got to savour it. 

(The first time doesn't matter a lot, but Luna rarely forgets (not that she remembers) the first time she sees someone. Because, well. Not a lot of people are unknown to her. She's all seen them in a crowd, in a shop, on a magazine cover, framed in an office, in someone's words. You could probably say that she likes to be prepared. There's a risk of hypertension when you meet someone out of nowhere, like when you jump into an ice-cold pool without getting wet first.

Oh, right. Ginny Weasley the First. In one of the carriages by the lake, maybe even in the train, but Luna isn't sure of that one. Shock of red hair, could be any of them. The carriages – that she's more sure of. She sees the freckled nose, the throat. Girl throat, she's pretty sure of that.)

Twelfth Ginny Weasley is the first she actually talks to. It's a little strange – let's just say that given her circle of friends, Luna should have had more opportunities that a lot of people to talk to her, but it is what it is. Luna does love strange, so it's not like it bothers her. 

(While there's a pause, let me tell you how Luna does in the castle. She takes to it like a fish in the water, in the most part. It's the people she has trouble with. She really just wants to talk to them, but she's as 'weird' as she was in middle school. Which, really, is ironic. Luna kind of wants to point out they live in a world where magic exists; it's not like wearing a necklace made of radish is particularly outlandish. Has none of them ever studied traditional troll apparel?)

It's not even a whole conversation. Ginny is red-cheeked and running from someone; she knocks into Luna in one of the moving staircases on the second floor. 

"Oh, hi," she says, grinning so wide it eats a bit at the corners of her mouth. Luna is instantly fascinated. The only thing you have to do to fascinate her is smile well, mind you, but not everyone manages it. 

"Hi," Luna says. She cards her fingers through her hair; it's not because she's weird and calm most of the time that she can't get nervous. She really wants to make friends with people. No, wait – she really wants to make friends with Ginny Weasley. 

(You probably don't need to be explained how Luna knows Ginny's name. She learnt it like you learn any name in school, from the channel of over-eager schoolboys, comparative studies, class listings, register call. All very boring stuff, except for the corridor gossip. Luna does have a bit of a soft spot for corridor gossip: people confide in her because she doesn't seem interested or susceptible to repeat the secrets to anyone important. She listens intently, her faded grey eyes trained on the tale-teller.)

Ginny is ready to bolt, and the staircase is gyrating heavily in the air. Really unpractical for people who have vertigo. She doesn't, but still. The staircase makes a grinding stone noise when it slots into a level. Ginny takes to her heel, ready to run, but then spins back. Her body is lithe and taut, like a dancer. Not an ounce of vagueness, Luna thinks, and resists the urge to look down at herself, ethereal and small. Couldn't run two miles – not that wants to, anyway. 

"Wait -" Ginny says. "You're my brother's friend, right?"

Ron. Yes, Luna knows Ron. Has for a while. They find her weird, too, but they don't mind. Harry does have a lightning bolt-shaped scar on his forehead, after all. How's that for weird? 

Still, saying yes wouldn't really be the truth. "You could say that," she says instead. 

It's surprisingly accurate when she thinks about it, because a lot of what she is rests on what people could say. What they think they guess, what they deduct, most of the time wrongly. Luna doesn't mind. It makes her laugh, like people who say that she can't really read the paper upside down. Who said the way they read it is the right way? Who says that's how it was printed to be read? 

"You know Harry, then?" Ginny asks. The spring in her heel still hasn't let down, and Luna is watching it unclench slowly until Ginny tenses again. Luna thinks it'd be sort of interesting to have her sprawled and unaware. For science. 

"Yes," Luna says. She can be categorical, this time. She knows Harry Potter, and she likes him. She likes his weirdness, she likes his kindness and the way he lets her be. The way he even asks her to explain, sometimes. If someone listens, Luna is always delighted to explain. 

Ginny jumps to her – can she even walk? - and presses Luna's hands in hers. "We're friends," she says. (Well, she probably says something else, because that does sound like a strange conversation, and probably not something Ginny would say, but that's what it means, and that's what Luna hears.)

"Okay," Luna says. Her mouth is slow; when the word's all out Ginny's already disappeared. Luna leans against the rail, waits for the staircase to stop twirling again, and gets off at a floor she's never been to. _Exploring._

The name of Ginny's first child is Scorpius. 

Well, no. 

It isn't her child. It's someone else's child, if Luna chooses to talk about biology and genetics, but the mother left. Now it's Ginny's child. It's its own person, of course, but Ginny looks after him. Cares for him. Luna supposes, from what she saw all her life, that that's what being a mother is like. Not like she has first-hand experience, see. She's not complaining, she just didn't have a mother. She doesn't want to assume. 

Luna visits them before a lot of people. Maybe it's because she doesn't judge, maybe it's for another reason, because she was doing something in this forest at this particular time (fascinating ground for Moonfrogs). She doesn't even knows if Ginny sent her an owl to invite her or if she just dropped in. She didn't feel unwelcome. 

(Here's how it could've happened: Luna knocks at the door with the big bronze knocker. It looks like a face and Luna has to admit it's vaguely threatening. When she was a child her dad told her of a Muggle fountainhead who bit your hand if you lied, and she had nightmares about it for days.

Ginny answers. Surprise shows on her face, she beckons her in. The child is sleeping, she says. Okay, Luna says. I'll get us some tea, Ginny says. Young, young Ginny. And her child.

Luna sits in one of the big chairs and watches the light play on the marbled floor.)

(Here's how it could've happened: Ginny sends an owl, grey with spots of brown, invites her to have tea sometimes. Talk about old times but mostly new. I know you won't judge me, Luna. You're not a last resort, but I'm tired of explaining.)

(Here's how it could've happened: Ginny and Luna spend a day together in London. They eat at a vegetarian Muggle restaurant, talk about what their lives have become and what they've always been, and for the afternoon Luna apparates them to the country, deep in the sun-slathered grass where a river runs like an adder in the meadow.)

Luna knows about Ginny and Draco – who doesn't? The papers talked about it for a bit, and even the Quibbler had an article about it. And the rest. Word on the street that Ginny, Ginny Weasley (by Weasley they mean Potter, of course, since she's one half of those dream couples people have a hard time letting go of) is getting hitched with the Malfoy boy. What a disgrace.

Turns out she isn't getting hitched. She's just in his manor, they're in love. It's their manor, after a while. Ginny takes care of the child with him. Like all the war children, they're white and fragile, still crumbling a bit, but containing it. Containing the breathing. Luna thinks they're doing pretty well, out of all of them. She calls them disaster children, sometimes, in her head. 

Luna sends an owl with a book about baby animals. It seems fitting, of course, but most of all it's a book Luna's always loved: all those babies with horns and teeth and claws and squinty eyes and fur, looking proudly out of the paper, running around. It's one of the rare books Luna doesn't feel has trapped them, because a child can run around forever and never get bored, which, of course, is common knowledge. 

In Hogwarts she comments Quidditch. It starts as a way to pass time (not that Luna ever has trouble passing time, she's really, really good at it, a true champion) but it grows into something else. Luna is nothing if not human, despite what people say, and she loves the adrenalin, all these people flying.

(Once she gets distracted during the commentary and gets talking about Ginny. She knows how she must look when she's like that, with her big, dreamy eyes open and vague, but she doesn't care. "Ginny's nice," she said. "I like her." She did. She still does. People rarely come in better forms than Ginny Malfoy, _née_ Weasley.)

Her dad used to say she thought like a Muggle because of how she was always amazed by what the wizards could do. "It's all normal," he said, "regular old Britain, but you see wonders in it. You're a star, my little girl," he said. He said she inspired him to be who he was. It took several years for Luna to understand how big a compliment that was. 

But the point is, flying! People flew, and flowers bloomed, and Luna Lovegood was genuinely awed by it all, wanted to understand. Commentating Quidditch probably wouldn't be the first thing that comes to mind when you hear all that, but it's what she did. She saw the little things. People laughed, jeered, tried to boot her out. Then just laughed. Luna is happy when she makes people laugh, even if she didn't intend to, at first. It's a good thing. 

(A policy of Luna's: laughter is always a good thing. It helped her go through every dark moment in her life, her mother's death, the sorrows and the moments stained with blood. It's quite a miraculous thing, when you think about it: a balm that you hold in your own ribcage, ready to bloom whenever you want it to, whenever you prompt it. There are few things Luna treasures more.)

Luna's tenth letter to Ginny Weasley is written in September 2002. Luna wouldn't know by herself (she doesn't care much for the dates and the days – it's enough regularity for her that each day has a dawn and a twilight, and even that she likes to contradict), but the response is cleanly branded with date and return address. 

The response – well, maybe it would make more sense to talk about the original letter first. The original letter is written in Muggle Argentina, from the inside of a barber shop in Mendoza where Luna is getting her hair cut before she moves further into the countryside. Nature forces her to be a little more severe with herself, even if it's all for the sake of adventure in the end; she's had to buy a pair of boots (dragon leather, but only from organic sloughing), a few magic knives she slung at her hips, and a hat. But Luna's always been good with hats. 

She writes with an organic quill because she couldn't find anything else, although she can't say she really tried. The tip scratches against the paper, and it feels strange from all those years of writing in Hogwarts, with the smooth ink slathering peacefully on the parchment scrolls. They were all so sheltered, thinks Luna. 

A vibrant joy pulses between her ribs (Luna imagines it as a ball of golden thread, glowing with tangled auras) and she tries to pour into her words. Dear Ginny, she writes. Dear, dear Ginny. She tells her of the things she saw: not the mountains, at first, but the trash on the streets, the little tinkering bell on the outside of an old deli, the tap-tap of an old woman's feet on the hot asphalt. I have gained a scar, dear Ginny, she writes, suppressing a shiver as the blonde locks fall on her naked back. On the inside of my thigh. It's a wonderful thing. 

She doesn't say where it comes from. It doesn't seem important, and if it is, there's always the next letter. Luna always writes with a purpose, and this correspondence is a red thread that binds her to England and to her friend. Ginny Weasley. Last time Luna saw her, she was kissing Harry Potter full on the lips. Her eyes were fierce. His were lightless. 

But Luna has never been one to advise people on their romantic choices, so she doesn't. She doesn't tell her to leave Harry. It would be cruel, anyway – he hasn't saved them all to end up being abandoned. Luna knows unfairness exists in the world (her mother's death is a blatant example of it), but it's not something she wants to perpetrate. 

She tries to imagine the forest as the words accumulate on the paper. Dear Ginny, my forest is luxurious and green. She tries to imagine the dampness of it, the slow crush of the leaves – as though it were her first forest. As though she'd never stepped on moss before, never touched a tree's bark, never knelt in the mud to try and attract a wild animal. Never said: it isn't a trap. 

My forest is hot, she writes. She apparated directly into Esteban's living-room (another letter-companion), welcomed in the unused fireplace by his stained couch and frayed rug. "Hi," he'd said from the outside, reaching a hand in. "You're all covered with soot."

"Esteban," she said in Spanish. The way it rolled off her tongue surprised her as it always did, easy and smooth. He smiled at her. She smiled at him. 

He told her of the city of Mendoza, its story and its long, large streets. Showed her the Observatory Fountain, standing erect and proud like a Versailles replica. Took her out to a dingy little restaurant and Luna, who wasn't older than twenty, didn't put a dress on. Tank top and shorts, she's changed since the war, hasn't she? She liked herself when she looked in the mirror. Proud daughter of Xenophilius and Areta, surely. At least _she_ 's proud. It's probably the only thing that matters. 

Esteban advised her to take a guide with her in the forest, because you can never be too careful. Muggles don't go there alone, never, unless they're born in the heart of the forest, and Wizards don't tempt the devil too often either. There's only so much you can chase with a wand. The Forbidden Forest is nothing next to this. There's a Wizarding School next to the edge of the forest, but no one goes in there to search for dissertation subjects. 

Esteban is tall with black eyes and dark, tanned skin. His hands are hard like leather and even if Luna thinks very hard, she can't think of how she met him. But as we already said, Luna Lovegood doesn't really care for memories. She cares for the here, now, and the here, now of then was sitting with Esteban Garreta in a badly-lit restaurant in the heart of Mendoza, eating nachos and laughing when the cheese dripped. 

Like everyone, Esteban frowned at Luna's pale pale skin. She's European, English, but her skin is more than that – it looks like it comes from the white north, the one that has its place in Luna's dreams of traveling after she's visited all those countries where the sun shines more than its due. 

"Your skin is so white," he said. 

Luna shrugged, touched her cheek. Not self-consciously, just touched it, like you touch a friend's skin. "I like it," she said. 

Esteban rolled his eyes. "Of course you like it," he said. "It's your skin."

Luna looked him in the eye, her eyes swirling grey, gold and a touch of green silver. "It's not that simple," she said. 

But it's not like they can do anything about her skin, so they leave it like it is, pale and unblemished and all in all not adapted to the hard-beating South-American sun. Luna doesn't care, she learns how to suck in the g in Argentina – at the end of the week she almost sounds Spanish, and the words are branded on her lips. Esteban smiles at her from the other end of the bed, says, "Well done, _chica_." She doesn't say she's not a child. She is. She hopes she will always be a child. 

Luna stays six days in Mendoza. The fifth day, she goes to a barber to have her hair cut, so the sweat and the tickling doesn't bother her in the forest. Luna would talk about a transformation if she wasn't someone who transforms every minute of every hour of every day, not so much physically as mentally, accumulating everything she leans and storing it in that wondrous brain of hers. Sometimes people ask her how it works, because it seems so random to them, so alien. Half of the time she points to her head, says, "Ask him." The other half she points to her heart. Truth is, she doesn't really know. 

Dear Ginny, she writes. I hope you're good in the big city all alone. I trust you to be alone, she writes, because Luna doesn't believe loneliness is a bag thing. Why would it be? All the years Luna's spent alone haven't hurt her. Maybe she's a little melancholy, a little strange, but she treasures her strangeness. It's a gift, to be able to be in awe over the littlest things. It's a big part of the reason why she's here, now, with Esteban, in Mendoza. If she wasn't curious and prone to wonder, who knows where she'd be? 

Dear Ginny, she writes (she conjures in front of her the juxtaposed images of Ginny from her school days and after the war: the proverbial red hair, getting longer and longer before its abrupt cut after the war was over; green eyes, mischievous grins, the bags under her eyes, kind hands – because Luna always wants to see the people she writes to, so she can be faithful to them in what she writes), I wish you all the sparkling melancholy, and then the happiness, and then the ecstasy. I saw a Nargle yesterday, you catching one in Hogwarts, it's in your hair, did you notice? Luna's not very good with tenses. She could be, but she doesn't want to. She likes being confusing. 

Dear Ginny, she writes, I'll be in the forest for a little while, I don't know how long. The letters might be slower.

Dear Ginny, she writes as the last lock falls in the collar of her shirt, over the red sunburn. Her skin is already pealing white and revealing her new skin. It's harder, tougher, it matches the dragon leather – it's new. Dear Ginny, my hair is short now. 

She licks the envelope without cutting her tongue. She's been writing to enough people to be capable to do that, but the first time burned her tongue so hard she was surprised at the intensity of it, sucked on the blood pensively, trying to call back the first electroshock. Luna always wants to call back the brief feelings to dissect them and find their mechanics. Her juvenile wonder grew into curiosity, and her curiosity grew into thirst of knowledge as easy as breathing. The stamp isn't exotic, but Luna likes that, too. Not everything she visits is exotic – she visits people, not postcards. 

She sends it off with a light kiss and a haphazard blessing. She's taken to using envelopes for her letters since she discovered them, because her letters often travel for a long time, into blizzards and heavy rains. The first few she sent got to their destination wrecked and in shreds, and as much as the idea of it was beautiful and poetic in its own Luna way, she'd rather not have that again. Here you go, she says, giving it to the owl at the post office. She reclines against the dirty wall. Closes her eyes. She likes to imagine where the owls are going each time she sends one. They're the ultimate travellers, after all – they fly over oceans carrying messages they don't read, dutiful, sharp-eyed, claws closed as if on instinct over their precious packages. 

"Thank you," she calls to the clear sky. It's unnaturally blue here, except in the summer. It's refreshing. You don't see blue skies a lot in the UK, even where Luna's from. 

(She doesn't think about where she's from too much. The memories are always painful, and Luna works these equations in two parts: a) she doesn't like memories b) she doesn't like hurting. Maybe it's just not worth it.)

She's lazy and Esteban is worried. "It's just a forest," she tells him.

He glares at her. She wants to explain she doesn't mean it's harmless, but she lacks the words. 

"I don't mean that bad," she says in her imperfect Spanish. She doesn't mind that it's imperfect. She doubts language is ever perfect, anyway, whether it be native to her or not. She'll learn as she goes along – as many people before her have said, there's no better way to learn than with the ones who have it on their tongues when they're born (incomplete, still made of clay and red breath). That's what Luna does when she travels: she makes it her mission to go as close as she can. She breathes the intimate nooks of their throats, sits on their soiled sheets, holds the children's hands and walks with their mothers on the promenades.

The night in Mendoza doesn't sleep like London, the heavy grey slumber, glittering in the trendy neighbourhoods. Luna opens her eyes when Esteban asks. The Mendoza night is heavy, but not with rain. It's heavy with heat, smell and wine. 

"We used to make a lot of wine here," Esteban says, pushing three fingers in the small of Luna's back. Luna allows it. "We still do."

The pride of this collective 'we' that transcends generation and gender has always held something mysterious and fascinating for Luna. Sometimes, when she's home (does she call it home still? Her words vary with her moods; language is her ever-changing ally), she wonders why she doesn't feel like that. Shouldn't there be this connection with the ground where so many of her ancestors rest? She's glad as she is, though. She likes the earth for what it is, for the gifts it gives her. Maybe it's a poorer love, maybe it's purer. Maybe it's just different. 

Luna lets herself be led through the city. She watches the lights sway in the sky and mix with the stars, listens to the drunken laughter. Muggles are dancing with wizards. Luna dances with Esteban. It's like a war, except the other way around: a place where everything that's supposed to be about concepts like race or sex ends up being about individuals, their warm skins and the way they look at each other. 

The summer of her fourth year in Hogwarts, Luna and her dad go to Sweden. Xenophilius packs the bags and tells Luna about the Crumpled-Horned Snorkack, which he wants to capture there. He doesn't want to harm it, Luna always makes sure of that. Just study it, for posterity. They're kind of like alchemists, before they turned evil and started having multifaceted heads. 

In return, Luna tells him about her year. She tells him about her friends, Harry and Ginny and Hermione and Ron and Neville and all the others, but especially them because of what happened at the Department of Mysteries. She tells him about helping the others see the Thestrals, and then mount them. He pats her head. 

"That was a good call, love," he says, kissing her forehead. He looks into the horizon rushing outside of the train windows, then turns back to her, smiling sadly. "You see good can come even from sadness."

That's the very lesson she learnt from him, and the one she won't ever forget. She snuggles into his side. That's the good thing about being an original: you're never too old to cuddle with your father.

The rest of the train ride is nice the way train rides with her dad always are. Luna misses him like mad during the year. She sends him letters (she loves letters; when she's older she'll write lots of letters to lots of fascinating people) but it's just not the same. The summer always starts with her running out of the train and jumping into his arms, and then with a dinner in Diagon Alley where they tell each other everything that happened during the year. 

He asks her the rest of the story later on the ride, when the train is already rushing through immaculate nature. She tells, sometimes getting distracted by the unblemished sky and the long valleys that stretch under them. That's why they always take the train when they go on holiday - apparating is nice if you're in a hurry, but the Lovegoods rarely are, and you don't get the view. 

She tells him about being afraid, so, so afraid as McNair held his hand over her throat and threatened her; frightened for her friends, for her life and for theirs. 

(In retrospect, Luna has fought more battles than she would ever have liked.)

"You keep away, love," her father tells her, and kisses her hair lightly. 

"I probably won't," she says. The truth is always the best way, he's the one who taught her that too. 

He sighs, but there's a smile shining through. "I know," he says. "I don't know why you're in Hupplepuff, really," he muses, drawing her close. "You should've been with the crazy brave."

She doesn't say anything. She isn't sure if she's fighting for loyalty and honour or just because she doesn't want to die (she doesn't want _him_ to die, or anyone). Sometimes Luna finds it hard to believe in bravery. 

Switzerland is magical like every new country is, at least to Luna. There's little she loves more than traveling - it's what she imagines drinking Firewhiskey would be like, when you're drunk and exhausted and everything springs up from beneath you, roaring and immense. And it's quiet, at the same time - there's the buzz of the people when they talk and kiss and fight and their discontinued chatter and there's the earth pounding like a song under their feet and all the animals they haven't discovered and the nature, long and unexplored… It makes everything else seem unimportant. 

It helps, in a way. 

The hundred and fifth letter is from China. Luna writes it from the 32nd floor of a building in the Kownloon Tong district in Hong Kong. It's a fancy hotel, and Luna's hair is starting to grow longer and tickle her ears.

China's not her favourite country, by far (there's something about the repulsion from carelessness, the restriction of public liberties and the cult of success that just rubs her the wrong way), but she can't deny there's something beautiful in this, the city sprawling under like a fat, glowing cat or a suicide victim. It's on the dangerous side of magnificent; Luna can almost _see_ the fumes drifting up towards the ozone layer, but in the second, the precise moment, it's beautiful. 

Yuja is already dressed when she comes back to the bedroom, in red. She likes red. It's a good colour on her. 

"You're ready?" she smiles. 

Luna shakes her hair, shaggy-dog style. She's wearing clothes, it's what she considers ready. "Yeah," she says. 

Yuja doesn't care, Yuja may be young but she's seen more than many; most of all, Yuja understands beauty. Like all the people Luna chooses for her adventures, Luna has a lot to learn from her. 

Yuja reaches out a hand. "Let's go, then," she says. 

It's Yuja, so instead of going to a fancy restaurant (Luna hates those, and generally avoids them like the plague), takes her to Kwu Tong Kong. They have to make their way through throngs, and it takes less time for Yuja's pretty dress to get sweat-stained than it took for her to get ready, but she doesn't care. 

Dear Ginny, she writes. I hope you're well. I'm in Hong Kong - I might go and see Pansy and Hanako if I have the time. Do you want me to tell them anything? How is Nate? Tell him I'll try and bring back a Snorkack horn next time I visit. 

They find a little, cramped restaurant. "That good?" Yuja asks in her perfect English, and Luna is stricken, once more, by how beautiful she is, in that peculiar way all interesting people are. That dress, with one strap pulled down by the crowd. Her lips when she laughs. 

"Good," she says, and Yuja leads her in. 

Dear Ginny, I think I might visit Kosovo next. I started corresponding with this British naturalist, he's called Rolf Scamander, maybe you know him? He said he might help me find one of the rarest species I've been looking for for years. It's odd to write to a stranger back home. Do you think I'm a stranger now? 

"Maybe I'm a stranger from everywhere," she ponders, chewing on her char kway teow. It's not sad, it's just - a strange idea. Being alien. Being other in this world you know so well. 

Yuja takes her hand over the table. A couple are looking at them, faintly accusing, but they stop looking when Yuja gives them a reprimanding head tilt. Maybe they recognize her; they turn their attention back to their dinner. 

"But isn't it great?" Yuja says. "Think about it. You can be a citizen of everywhere."

It's a nice idea, if utterly tempting. "I might just take that for myself," Luna says. Yuja smiles at her. 

Dear Ginny, she writes. Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror and I don't recognize the seventeen-year-old soldier. Does that happen to you? It's not a bad thing, I don't think so. I like being different. But it's peculiar, isn't it? 

(It is, Ginny will write back. And imagine that with a massive belly. Freak out material, I can tell you.)

Yuja says she'll accompany her to the countryside, since she has some free time. It isn't a lot, three weeks at best, but Yuja knows the country well. She's a fearless adventurer herself, as Luna sometimes calls her, jokingly. 

"You'll see," Yuja says in her ear, the shadows and lights making a classical painting of her face, "there's nothing like the Taklamakan desert," and the way her voice slips back into its natural accent, the words, the images it evokes, transforms simple words into poetry. 

As they leave the restaurant, stomach full with dragonfruit and bubble tea, an old man stops them. 

"Mrs Wang," he says to Yuja, and he kisses her hand. 

Yuja smiles at him. She doesn't do anything else, doesn't even acknowledge what is probably the sincerest thank you, she just smiles at him; and it's beautiful the way only these things can be, because it speaks of him, of her and of their collective country, of the dragons and the poverty and the oppression. It speaks of everything more accurately than any president could – because Luna knows it, she knows that power is here, in individuals, in Yuja and the old man and even her. 

Dear Ginny, life keeps being oddly beautiful. You sound happy - the photos look great. Say hi to Draco for me. I have Yuja here. I've told you about her, haven't I? 

"Will you play me something?" she asks Yuja later; she doesn't mean to, it just slips out of her lips. But then, most of the things Luna says she doesn't intend to. So far, it hasn't turned out too bad for her. 

"I don't know," Yuja says, resting her back against the giant windows, and Luna watches as the city draws a halo around her, dark night splattered with sharp golden paint, "will you play for me?"

Dear Ginny. I am leaving Hong Kong next week. Give everyone in England my love, and if you ever come to Hong Kong, I recommend the 32nd floor. 

Ron introduces her to his father the first time Luna comes to the Burrow, shortly after the war. Molly gives everyone, herself included, time to heal their wounds before she organizes an enormous party at the Burrow. Luna comes – she doesn't know why she comes, actually. She heard about it from word of mouth, Ron probably invited her; as many things about Luna, it's mostly a case of here at the right place at the right time.

The party's already in full swing when she arrives. She doesn't mind; if anything, it makes it easier to tread between the guests and dip into the bowls of brightly coloured foods. There's a joyfully profane atmosphere about the whole thing that Luna can't help but feel at home in, and she chirps to everyone she meets, happily babbling gibberish to the guests' mostly impassive faces. They're almost all veterans of the war, and they know Luna, if not personally, from reputation – she's one of Dumbledore's Army, and it hasn't been long enough yet that those who fought have forgotten them. 

Arthur Weasley is a red head peeking out of the crowd. It bobs from left to right as he tries to explain something to a bemused interlocutor, but Arthur isn't giving up. Luna remembers him vaguely from a few occasions, a photograph in Ron's mail, a face at Bill and Fleur's wedding, a warrior in the war. 

(Luna doesn't consider herself a warrior. She fought, yes, but – she's not a warrior. She doesn't kill. She's seen enough death, saw the Thestrals for the first time when she was nine years old, on her knees from seeing her mother die. If she's killed, she wants to forget.)

He lets go of his victim and slides a slice of cake on a plate, eyeing it with concupiscence. 

"You should be careful," Luna warns him, because she's nothing if not considerate. "Cake attracts Moonfrogs."

Contrary to most people, though, even Luna's friends, he doesn't laugh or wave it away. His eyes light up with evident interest and he pushes the plate away from his chest. 

"Are those dangerous?" he asks, scrunching his brows. 

Luna makes a contemplative face. "Not really," she says, tilting her head. "But they're almost extinct, you don't want to eat them."

Arthur glances back down at his cake. 

"Are they invisible?" he asks, very seriously. 

Luna shrugs. "We're not sure," she says. "One of our scientists went to the moon a few years ago with a CleanSweep Six and brought them back, and we haven't been able to trace them since then."

"Oh," Arthur says, looking supremely interested. It makes Luna smile – it really doesn't happen often. She has friends, but none of them are interested by her and her father's discoveries. Even Neville, who ought to be, at least a little, doesn't care. "This is fascinating," he says. "What did you say your name was?"

"I didn't say," Luna answers, but she reaches out a hand for him to shake: "Luna Lovegood."

"Oh, of course," he says, comprehension dawning on his face. "I should've realized, I'm sorry." Luna waves his concern off. "And your father is Xenophilius, right?" he asks. 

"Yes," she says. She motions to the crowd. "He's here, somewhere."

"Fascinating, fascinating," he repeats. 

The conversation flows easily after that: Mr Weasley ("Call me Arthur," he says after ten minutes of conversation, and she does – it rolls so much more easily off the tongue, really) tells her about Muggle culture and artefacts and why they're so interesting, and in exchange Luna tells him about the creatures her father and her search for and catalogue. Luna feels like she's found a friend, for once. 

She smiles a lot. He tells her she has a nice smile, and she thinks – after all, maybe the war wasn't for nothing. Maybe they reaped more than just misery. 

Luna can't think back to the first time she kissed a girl. It was during the Tournament, that she's sure of, because she remembers – she remembers a blue cape, and blond hair, lips thin and soft like sugar mixed with glitter. 

She couldn't tell the exact day or even the name of the girl. It happened a few times, being pressed against a wall in a corridor, the shape of small, pointed breasts pressed against her own and then disappearing – but then the Tournament was over and it was everyone back home where they belonged after the tragedy. 

Luna doesn't think it's a very important thing. She only ever kisses or lets herself be kissed by people she wants to kiss, there's really nothing more to say about it. She doesn't even mention it in her letters, or only in passing, when she's not describing the crushing beauty of the countries she's passing through. 

Luna is still in the train when she writes the first letter. She's going to France and she wanted to take the Eurostar – she loves trains and this one was just another, peculiar jewel to add to her collection, shining with the tons and tons of seawater pressed above it. 

She's thought about who she was going to write to, even jotted down names in a little notebook the way she almost never does. But in the end it was a little evident, and there was only her. It's not even that Luna likes her more than the others – only they've been together a lot since the war ended, long afternoons spent talking or walking near the river, in Ginny's endless gardens, and she's entrenched in her house, the walls closed around her life as though she were a delicate flower.

Ginny didn't understand when Luna told her she was leaving. 

"Why?" she asked, letting out a little shriek when the grass behind her tickled her back. 

"Because you're unhappy," Luna said. She's not one to keep things in; even when she doesn't really want to, they shoot out like stars, burning high and fast. 

Ginny frowned. "Stop with that, Luna," she said shortly. She doesn't like acknowledging things. She's strong but she's like the whole family, so damn stubborn. Luna knows what she's thinking, for once. She's thinking, _what will I be if I let go of him?_

"You won't be worth less," Luna said. She brushed the pulp of her finger against a flower's petals. It made her smile. 

"Just let it go," Ginny sighed. 

Luna shrugged. "Okay," she said simply. "Anyway. That's why I'm going."

"But don't you feel like you owe something to this country?" Ginny asked. "You've helped save it, after all."

"I know," Luna said. "But I'm not like you. I don't care about honour. Fighting with you wasn't about saving the world, Ginny."

Ginny didn't ask what it was about. Maybe it was because she didn't think Luna wanted to tell, or maybe she was just afraid of the answer. 

"Okay," she said eventually. She closed her eyes for a second, opened them again. "Do you know where you're going to go?"

Luna shrugged again. "I'm going to use Muggle transportation, I think. I'll say goodbye tomorrow. I'll see if there are enough stars in the sky to leave tomorrow night. Choose a plane at random."

"Aren't there places you don't wanna go?" Ginny asked. 

"Not really," Luna said, and she rolled to her side. She held her hand up; Ginny tangled their fingers. "I just want to discover."

They chewed on the thought for a while, lying side by side by the river with their fingers laced. Then Luna spoke; for the first time of the afternoon, it wasn't confident. 

"You're going to be happy," she asked, "right?"

Ginny didn't turn to face her. Instead, she smiled up at the sky. "Of course," she said.

Dear Ginny, she writes in the Eurostar, I am writing to you because you're the only one who makes sense. I hope that when you get this letter it's not the same hour where you are than where I am. 

It's not a week after she left, not even a month. For a long time she didn't need to be tied back to the old country, Luna Lovegood was a free electron. She went dancing in Rio de Janeiro and the fire was stitched to her skin, it was a good fire, her hips were moving like she was possessed and there were Muggles crowding all around her. So that's what it feels like to be desired, she thought, and she liked it. Not being a good witch or an efficient warrior, a good daughter – being a _woman_ , for the first time. It made her think that it was the only thing she ever wanted to do. 

The albinos girl, they called her. She never bothered to correct them, didn't want to. It was okay to be pointed at in the brown-skinned city of laughter because your hair was blonde and your skin was pale and freckled.

Luna danced and drank and didn't search for oblivion; it was all discovery, the avid hands she laid on skin and the food she took ferocious bites of, the lights and the party and the ground that your knees would kiss at three AM when you'd had too much. 

Dear Ginny, they would tell you the same things as I: there's no time to be unhappy on this earth.

When she left Rio de Janeiro she didn't look back. She wanted to go to France now, because she didn't want one kind of joy but all of its variations: the delicate and the cloudy, the firey and the intense, the intricate and the rough. She wanted the pounding ecstasy and the eyes rolling at the back of her head. She wanted to lay her head on the cobbled promenades on the left banks of the Seine. 

When she came back to England to take the Eurostar, she tip-toed on the British soil. A man with a birthmark that took up half his face asked her why she walking so peculiarly and she said she was afraid the country would suck her back in and never let her go. 

The two hundredth letter came from Huston and just said: Dear Ginny, come here and get a burger with me. Keith says hi.

When Luna dies she's ninety-eight and she's excavating a tomb in Egypt. She flew here two years before, when the tomb was discovered. When the Egyptian government first asked her to take over the project there was a big uprise. Her detractors said she was too old, and wasn't she a naturalist anyway? Luna's only response was to fax them a copy of her egyptology degree. 

The tomb is in Abydos, near one of the Muggle sites that they excavated a decade or two ago. The earth is still fresh, smells like it's new, ready to give up its treasures. Luna gets to work the first day. 

Everyone in her team loves her. She's ninety-eight but she's still in top shape, she climbs in and out the excavation site so easily that the only times she asks for help is when she wants to flirt with the one of the volunteers. José takes it very graciously and flirts right back. 

Dear Ginny, she writes. If you're a cactus near the site, I hope you're proud of me. We've made amazing progress. Ginny, I miss my old lovers. I feel old, these days. I hope I'll grow next to you. Maybe I'll be an oak tree. I've always loved oak trees. Or a Moonfrog, I've never seen one.

She dies the day they find the pharaoh. It's one the Muggles don't even know existed, but he's beautiful, all glittering and proud, laid down in the cool black earth. They holler for half an hour after they find it, give each other bone-crushing hugs. Kalee the foreman sweeps Alice the trainee off the ground and kisses the breath out of her. Luna cheers with everyone else. 

The team offers her to be the first to go down and see the mummy. She agrees enthusiastically, tells them stories of finding the last bird of the Gracki species and the adrenalin that cursed through her when she did. They kiss her on both cheeks, wish her good luck in Arabic. 

It's a revelation when she sees it. The energy electrocutes her and she can't breathe for a second, her heart hammering. Her vision is cloudy. She stumbles and José's behind her in a second, holding her waist to keep her from falling and hurting herself. She flutters her eyelashes flirtatiously at him. 

"I'm fine, darling," she says. "Go do something useful instead of worrying about me."

He smiles. "I doubt this one's got a lot of health issues," he says, pointing to the mummy. 

It's all so beautiful. It's not just the gold, it's the life they buried here, and Luna might have always hated memories (she's grown out of that, now, though – she'll admit she keeps a picture of Rolf in her wallet and that she sometimes kisses it before going to sleep) but this is more, this is the dead teaching them. They might not always learn the lesson, it doesn't make it any less beautiful. 

She's giddy when she comes back up; she slips on a rock and opens her head. She doesn't think about a lot, when she dies, it's so sudden – her eyes are still full of the man's golden traits, and it's like a gift, because Luna couldn't have thought of any better picture to die on. She just hopes they won't be too sad, the crew, that they won't abandon the excavation or imagine a curse. 

_Take care of the mummy_ , is her last thought, and then it's over.

The twenty-seventh answering letter goes something like this: Luna, I broke up with Harry. I'm staying with Ron and Hermione for now, but I can't stand them fucking and trying to be quiet, it's even worse than if they weren't trying. Seriously, couldn't they start when they were still at Hogwarts? Too much pent-up sexual tension. 

I feel so young, Luna, you know? I couldn't save him. You were right. I don't know if there's anything to save. I don't want to see what's going to happen, but I'll probably have to. I'm exhausted. I hope you're having fun in Malaysia. When you answer, join photos from there and from where you'll be then.

Luna feels as proud of her as she would be of her child. She rarely thinks she wants to be a mother, but in those moments she wonders. She travels too much, anyway – she probably couldn't take care of it. No, she trusts the people she left in England to have children, she'll visit them. They're all still so young. She hopes, strongly and fiercely, that there'll be a little Weasley daughter and that Ginny will hold someone's hand to their violin lesson. Hell, she hopes Harry Potter rocks a child in his arms some day. 

After Kosovo, Rolf Scamander suggests they meet. She says yes. He's interesting, young, with an outstanding student record and fascinating new ideas about the future of naturalism. They agree to meet in Moscow. He wanted to do it in Vienna, but she's already been there, and she thinks going to any place twice before she's been everywhere is a waste of time. 

She's been waiting for him in a café near the Leningradsky station for nearly twenty minutes when he barges in. She doesn't spot him at first – they never exchanged pictures – but he gestures wildly at her. It makes sense he knows what she looks like, after all: she's the youngest female naturalist to ever have discovered so many species before age twenty-five, and even though she rarely agrees to stay still for photoshoots there are a few pictures of her floating on the Internet, mostly candids from the people she worked with. She doesn't like working alone. 

"Miss Lovegood!" he calls. 

She waves back, smiling. He's charming: long and wild-limbed, with a curly head of brown hair and wire-framed glasses. He's as fresh-faced as a baby, despite the slim moustache (and who wears a moustache in this day and age, seriously? She likes him just for that), but she knows he's only younger than her by two years. 

"Hello, Rolf," she says. 

He cuts her off with an apology. "So sorry I'm late, I took the train from St Petersburg, you know how they are, always late..." She notices he's dragging a battered-looking suitcase behind him, the wheels knocking against his heels. 

She holds a hand up. "Don't worry about it. Do you want something to drink?"

He slumps into the chair opposite her, breathing out a sigh. "Yes, please. Earl Grey."

She orders and leans towards him, resting her chin in her palms. "So, what do you think of Moonfrogs?"

He smiles distractedly at her. "Oh, they're one of the most interesting species, though I think there are sub-species that haven't been recognized yet, I don't see why they won't record them as magical animals already, it's just hindering the whole process." He frowns. "Do you think they have lemon here?"

She ticks a box in her head. _This is someone I was searching for_ , she thinks. It makes her happy like discoveries always do, giddy to the core. 

When he's devoured to the last of the pastries, which are crispy and doused in flour-like sugar, she asks him if he wants to come back to the hotel with her. He flounders for a while and she watches, laughing; then he says yes. 

So the forty-third letter is written from the hollow of his back, because she wanted to try it out – her love for Muggle literature showing (Luna always paid rapt attention in Muggle classes, and it turns out Arthur isn't only interested in Muggle technology but in a lot of aspects of their culture). It's not as comfortable as it looked when John Malkovitch was doing it, but she's not overly surprised. 

Dear Ginny, meet Rolf. I already told you about him, but his skin is very soft, so I think I'll keep him. I told Yuja I'd visit her in the spring, though. Did Draco buy you ice-cream yet? Be careful with him, boys like him are made of porcelain. 

PS: Oh, and if you see his mother, tell her she's very pretty.

Rolf is a pretty traditional guy but Luna never presents the way she lives like something avant-garde. She just tells it like it is: she's not something you can tie down, she'll never stop travelling and she always loves a country entirely, with its streets and its people. She tells him about the few who don't really wait for her but that she doesn't mind returning to.

"They all live near deserts," she tells him while he's kissing her throat, his moustache tickling her. "It's because I don't mind crossing deserts more than once. You can never learn a desert entirely, you know?"

He stops mouthing at her sinews for a second to say, against her skin: "I know."

It's different, sleeping with a naturalist. He treats her body like a new species, like a new land, he explores the fauna and flora with diligence and precision. She'd have thought, from his appearance (of course she doesn't judge people on their appearance, but there's something about it that really is wired in the human nature), that he would be fumbling and devoted; but he goes into it with a purpose and his willowy is strong. When he goes down on her it's even better than Lucie from France, and she was a genius at it. 

When Luna is nine years old, her mother dies. It's quick: looking back, it's more merciful than a lot of the deaths in Luna's life. Luna is drawing creatures on a piece of paper in the garden, liberally adding horns and scales here and there, when there's a boom in the house. Luna startles. 

It's ten minutes before her father runs out of the house crying, and she's come back to drawing. She's even coloured a strand of her hair because she decided it would look better if it was green. She was right – it does. 

He kneels in front of her, breathing loud. "Luna," he says. She wants to answer but he wraps her in a hug, crushing her against his chest. 

"Dad," she whines, muffled. "You're hurting me."

He lets her go and cups her face, looking right into her eyes. Sometimes she wonders what he saw. Her eyes were always bulging and blue, never could look like she cared, even though she did, she always did. Maybe not then. Maybe that's what he saw. Maybe he saw a child and maybe he saw a monster. Who knows. If there's something Luna's learnt from her life, it's that man is endlessly complex. 

He doesn't lie to her. For that she's graceful; he set the bases of their relationship. They never lie to each other. Sometimes they don't tell, sometimes they lie to others, but never to each other. They never forget that they're the only one the other has left. 

"Your mother is gone, poppyseed," he says.

She looks up at him. She doesn't understand. What is so important about her mother leaving? She leaves all the time. For her job, to get groceries, when she visits her cousins in Vancouver... 

"When is she coming back?" Luna asks. 

He hugs her again, and this time she doesn't fight it, lets herself be absorbed by his frame. "That's the thing, dove," he says, his voice broken in a hundred places. "She's not coming back."

Luna doesn't cry then. She cries later, when the understanding dawns. It's the most painful thing she's ever felt, but like everything, it passes. 

Luna stays a year in Edenville. She writes fifty letters, thirty-four of which are to Ginny, builds two wells, teaches at a school for eight months, stays in Eve's hut for six and a half. The elders never accept her, but the children do after a while. Eve tells her she'll never belong there. 

"You're too white," she says, playing with Luna's hair. It's always been a big subject of attention, but Luna never cared for it. It's too long, it tangles, but when she cuts it she feels like she's cutting the roots of a tree. Maybe it's because she had long hair during the war. 

"It's okay," Luna says. "I don't want to belong." It's always nice, of course, but it's not the most important thing. She wants to live; not belonging will make it easier to leave when it's time. 

Eve doesn't see the joke in her name. Luna doesn't tell her. She's not interested in politics or in religion, and what those people see in God is something she'll never be able to understand. She has trouble making her peace with that (she hates not understanding) but when it comes, eventually, it's a relief. The heat of it sweeps over her and makes her sweat. 

Lesedi, one of the boys from the village, teaches her how to help in the fields and takes her to the mountains. She hurts her feet several times. He doesn't wait for her. 

"You learn the hard," he says in imperfect English, and then, slipping back into his language: "That's where you get the wisdom."

The first ten days are difficult: the people don't understand why she's here, won't talk to her except to ask for money sometimes. She doesn't know the language. Her hurt is bare, the mosquitos come at night in swarms, her body is having troubles adapting to the climate, to the food, to the silence. 

She fights through it. 

Dear Ginny, she writes, today I started learning the language. I know some African dialects and a girl from the village, Eve, told me that she'd been to school and that she'd help me. I'm still sick and burned all over but it's getting better. Tell me about you. How is Draco? Nate? 

When the village council accept that she teach their children English if she helps with financial matters with the farming products, she can't believe it. Her joy. Her luck. She goes to the market and buys meat to grill. Eve and her eat it with maize porridge; it's a Sunday dinner but the happiness is overwhelming, like rain. 

The kids don't like her at first. They don't trust her; not only is she white, she's _too_ white, her hair is white too and her eyes are pale, a blue that doesn't exist here. 

This too takes time, but Luna has grown out of impatience a long time ago. She runs with them, they teach her to respect everything that comes out of the earth, she sees their bellies distorted by dysentery and endures their screams. They don't understand sitting in a classroom for an entire day, so she takes her sandals off and burns her soles on the ground too. _I'm one of yours._

She isn't, she never will be, but they accept her among them. It's like they know that it's just for a while; the elders say she can come to the dances but can't dance, and she can't be at village meetings but she'll have a hut and her very own mosquito net. 

She sees wizardry here and there, but it has nothing to do with what they used to do at Hogwarts. She looks when she can, but her wand remains strapped to the inside of her suitcase. Not even Eve knows about it. No one knows about her and Eve. She writes to Rolf once in a while, but he's busy too, in the United States meeting with other naturalists. 

Find someone to keep close and embrace at night, she writes. I have. I hope everything is going the way you want to. Is Melbourne in September good for our rendezvous? 

The children kiss her hands when she leaves. She knows the language almost perfectly by then, she can sing with them. They help push the car until it roars off in the dust. Luna would have preferred walking, but her body doesn't take the sun very gently. It's a little of a curse, given how much she likes it. 

Eve says goodbye with a hug and Lesedi says he'll name an oxen after her. She thanks him by kissing him on both cheeks. She asks them to live good lives, and they promise dutifully, holding their hands to their hearts. She doesn't doubt them. The gift of their people is this ability to be happy whatever happens. Selfishly, she hopes they won't wander too deep into the city. 

She takes a detour through the UK before going to Melbourne. She drops in unannounced – Ginny and Draco and kissing on the couch, his back undulating over her. She watches for a few minute, revelling in their beauty, before speaking. 

"Hello," she says. 

They jump. They apologize profusely – Ginny buttons up her shirt and Draco presses his hand to his crotch instinctively – only stopping when she assures them that really, it's okay, really. 

Luna glances outside. It's dark. There are no mosquitoes. The night is silent; in Africa, the night is the noisiest time. Nature always roars when it's left to its own devices. 

Ginny steps in to hug her. Her skin is still warm but she's smiling – it stretches over her mouth like she can't keep it in. 

"Hey," she says softly somewhere in Luna's shoulder. "You're back."

It's funny, how much closer they became since Luna left. So many letters. A few visits here and there, but they told so much on paper. Luna finds it surprising, in a good way.

"Just for awhile," she says. Her thumbs brush on Ginny's hips, holding her close. It's instinct, now – Africa may be severe now and again, but it isn't prude. Ginny will understand that. "I'm leaving for Melbourne tomorrow, I'm meeting Rolf there."

Ginny takes her hand, leading her to the couch. "Do you want tea? You must be exhausted. I assume you didn't apparate from Edenville?"

"No," Luna says. She ducks her head. She's exhausted, yes; now that Ginny said it, it drops on her like a ton of bricks. "Tea would be great."

Ginny trails spider fingers along the nape of Draco's neck. Luna watches in without shame – gestures of intimacy have always fascinated her. "Draco, darling, would you...?" 

He nods. "Sure." He stands up, ducking to kiss Ginny on the lips, and disappears into the kitchen.

"So," Ginny says when he's out of the room, turning to Luna. "How are you?"

Luna nestles into the couch. It's strange, being back, it will take time to get accustomed to it and Luna won't give it to herself, but for the moment comfort is enough. "I'm fine. Tired, I guess. I've seen so many things there. You should go someday."

Ginny smiles. Not sad. Wistful, maybe. "I'm not a traveller like you."

"You could be."

Ginny sighs. "I don't think so. I have my family to take care of."

"After, then."

"I like this country too much. I'm from here."

"I'm from here too."

"But you're not, really," Ginny says. It's not a reproach; she says it like it's not a big deal, like it's just who Luna is, and maybe it's true.

"So you and Rolf, are you..." Ginny asks. 

"We're together," Luna says off-handedly. 

"But are you -" Ginny starts. Luna loves her, but she never understood that you could love more than one person at once. It's okay. Some people don't get it. It was an easy enough discovery for Luna, but then, she never cared much about the 'normal' procedure. After all, she used to wear a Buttonbeer necklace in high school. She still isn't sure she knows what normal _means_. 

"We're what we are," Luna says softly. "We sleep together. I love him. He loves me." 

That's never been a problem for Luna. Talking about love, and sex. There's no reason to be shy about it, and she doesn't understand why some people are – love is something to be celebrated, not hidden. 

"Okay," Ginny says, ducking her head. It doesn't mean she understands, of course, but it means she accepts not to. 

"What about you? Nate and Scorpius?" Luna asks. It's not politeness. She doesn't really care for children but every time she sees those it seems to her that they're shining, glowing from the inside with their parent's brightness. 

The mention of her children brings a new smile to Ginny's face. She really was born to be a mother, Luna thinks. How queer. "They're good, they're great. Scorp is in love with this girl at his school, Lisa, it's absurdly cute, and Nate is going to be starting his piano lessons in a week. He's excited. Did you know Narcissa used to play piano?"

She says it like it's nothing. Luna thinks about her saying that she had no talent except beauty when she was sixteen, on a night with two much Butterbeer, ill-advised decisions and puking in the Astronomy tower. She wants to go back to being there with her, holding her hair back, wants to lean back and say: "You're a bridge-mender. When you grow up, that's what you do. You mend bridges."

"No, I didn't," she says instead. She's grown up a little, too, for some reason. 

Draco comes back, bearing tea and biscuits. "Here you go, ladies," he says. He gives them a little smile. "I'm going to check on the kids. You have a good talk, yeah?" He kisses Ginny. "I'll be waiting for you in bed."

He winks at her when he leaves the room and she laughs like the schoolgirl she didn't get to be.

"This is all you, you know," Luna says instead of thinking it.

Ginny turns around, surprised. "What?"

"This, this is all you. You're the best of us, did anyone ever tell you that?"

Another would fuss with the china and duck under the compliment, but Ginny doesn't, she just stands there with her hands on her knees, looking frozen. "No. They didn't. Am I?"

"You are," Luna says. 

Ginny doesn't say anything for a few seconds, and then she nods. "Okay."

They drink their tea with honey. When they talk again after, it's softer, and it pleases Luna. It's the little things. 

When Ginny dies, Luna doesn't go to the funeral. She doesn't send her condolences. She's never been very good at the whole social stuff, so people only resent her for a little while, and then they forget. "It's Luna," they probably say, "Loony Luna." Or maybe they're too knee-deep in grief to think about her. 

The point is, Luna doesn't go to the funeral. She has a rendezvous with Yuja in Jamaica but she doesn't go either. Maybe she even forgets to tell her. She'll understand. She knows how much Luna loves Ginny. Well. No one really knows, even Luna isn't sure, but he has an inkling. The general map without the localities. 

She goes to Greece instead. She's just come back from the Antarctic so she forgets her suitcase on the plane, and when she comes out it's just her and this flimsy purple dress she got from somewhere, bare-shouldered, bare-footed. People look at her. Luna doesn't mind. She walks. 

"Where is the sea?" she asks, and people make her climb mountain after mountain, this is Cape Sounion, they say, it's high up but it's worth-it. I don't care about worth-it, she says, sweet but toneless, just tell me. They tell her. 

It's almost sunset when she gets there. She breathes out. 

She was afraid, for a moment, but this is it. This is what she wanted. 

She lowers herself on her knees, and the sea below her is blue and glittering, and the temple is old and covered in antique graffiti and her feet are aching and the sun is red, but this is where Ginny's death becomes real. This is where, for a moment, Luna holds Ginny's soul in the palm of her hand. 

Dear Ginny, but this time she doesn't write. It's too soon to put pen to paper. Dear Ginny, there are some people we think will never die. We think because they're so bright, so alive, they'll never disappear. It wouldn't be fair. It wouldn't fit in the balance of the universe. They have things to do before they go. 

You were one of those people. 

*

"Is that all?" he asks. 

She's crying, but she doesn't make a movement to wipe her tears. He doesn't offer a handkerchief. "Oh, no," she says softly. "There's so much more. But I don't think we have the time, do we? And certain things are better off in people's memories."

"Thank you," he says. 

She smiles at him through the tears. "No, thank _you_ ," she says, and she's already looking at something else, somewhere beyond. "I needed her. She's always the one who knows where to go next." Her voice drops; the next sentence is a whisper. "And she thought it was me."

He blinks. When he opens his eyes, she's slipping out the door. He catches the leathery lace of her sandal on her white heel, the corner of her smile, a lock of blonde hair, a little wave of her spidery fingers, and she's gone. 

"Goodbye," he hears like an echo, murmured sound drifting to his ear. 

He switches the recorder off; breathes in.


End file.
